When the whip comes down
By 
Everybody knows this famous parable:
A physicist, an engineer and an economist are stranded in the desert. They are hungry. Suddenly, they find a can of corn. They want to open it, but how?
The physicist says: “Let’s start a fire and place the can inside the flames. It will explode and then we will all be able to eat”.
“Are you crazy?” says the engineer. “All the corn will burn and scatter, and we’ll have nothing. We should use a metal wire, attach it to a base, push it and crack the can open.”
“Both of you are wrong!” states the economist. “Where the hell do we find a metal wire in the desert?! The solution is simple: ASSUME we have a can opener”…
In my version it’s a can of tuna, and a priest rather than a physicist (“let’s pray to God to send us a can opener”), along with the engineer and the economist.
True story: last winter I was chatting with a tenured professor of economics at a social event, and referenced the can opener joke, and he had never heard it before!
Speaking of funny stories economists tell, check out this hilarious but rather disturbing story related by Andrew Gelman.
Short version:
In 1970, Steven N.S. Cheung, who would go on to become a very widely cited Chicago School economist, told the following story to a colleague:
In 1970, Toronto’s John McManus was my guest in Seattle. I chatted to him about what happened when I was a refugee in wartime Guangxi. The journey from Liuzhou to Guiping was by river, and there were men on the banks whose job was to drag the boat with ropes. There was also an overseer armed with a whip. According to my mother, the whipper was hired to do just that by the boatmen!
My tale went the rounds, and it was seized by a number of neo-institutional economists. I tried to dissuade McManus, tell him not to publish his piece based on my Guangxi story, but he went ahead nonetheless. (See his “The Cost of Alternative Economic Organizations”, Canadian Journal of Economics1975). In 1976 Jensen and Meckling (1976) published a widely-cited paper in Journal of Financial Economics (“Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure”). As a result of all this, the Guangxi boatmen and their hired whippers gained posthumous fame. However, this could be a story invented by my mother – the smartest person I have ever known – to entertain a boy of seven!
Wow, that’s pretty funny Prof Cheung!
Except that several years after you were mortified by the spectacle of a story you told to another economist that consisted of nothing more than something you claim you remembered your mother told you when you were a small child — this would have been in 1942/43 btw — becoming part of the empirical framework of The Scholarly Literature, this very same story somehow became empirical backing for your own academic work:
My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the Communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them.
This is from Cheung’s most famous and widely cited article!
It gets better.
Here are three eminent economists (I know this sounds like the set-up for another joke) recently “quoting” Cheung’s quarter-baked anecdote:
in a story by Steven Cheung (1983, 8): “On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”
This is from a 2015 paper in the Journal of Political Economy, which Google tells me is one of the very top journals in the entire field of economics.
Gelman puzzles over the very interesting and also academically significant question of how in the hell exactly does something like this happen? Note that the authors are purportedly quoting their source directly, but in the process they somehow confabulate a whole exotic — one might even say orientalist — narrative, chock full of details that are not only absent in the original source, but actually radically shift the historical setting of the original story (which at this point readers should probably be reminded is just some half-assed anecdote that the author claimed he remembered his mother telling him 40 years earlier when he was a seven-year-old boy, which then became a historical “fact” in the writings of other authors, which then became a “fact” in his own subsequent scholarship).
There’s lots more in Gelman’s post, which you should read in its entirety, but I’ll just add a few things:
(1) A commenter at Gelman’s site (the comments to the post are pretty interesting themselves) writes:
A story told to a seven-year-old is admittedly very weak evidence, but it is evidence.
Though I have no idea whether the story is actually true, it sounds more plausible to me than it does to a lot of commenters here. To learn more, you’d have to ask questions of people deeply familiar with social conditions in pre-Communist China. Since I’m not one of those people, there’s not much I can say about that.
Um, no. If what is more properly characterized as “a story that a man claims many decades later he remembers his mother telling him when he was seven” counts as evidence of the existence of a social practice in the real world for which there is apparently no other extant evidence whatsoever, then the word “evidence” has been pretty much drained of any meaning. I mean even if Cheung is telling the truth about what he remembers, which there’s good reason to doubt (see below), memories of early childhood are notoriously unreliable, plus as Cheung himself admits, there’s no particular reason to believe his mother wasn’t just making up a story to amuse/comfort her small child, although Cheung conveniently “forgot” this when his story had been transmuted by other economists into empirical fact, via this bizarre game of academic sociological telephone.
(2) Cheung isn’t exactly a reliable source to begin with, leaving aside the flagrant absurdity of this whole thing. From Wikipedia:
In 2016, Cheung claimed to have written “1,500 articles and 20 books in Chinese” during his academic career.[1]
1,500 articles? Is he the Wilt Chamberlain of economics? Less amusingly:
On January 28, 2003, Cheung was indicted on thirteen counts by a US federal grand jury. The charges consisted of six counts of filing a false income tax return, six counts of filing false foreign bank account reports, and one count of Conspiracy to Defraud the United States. Cheung was accused of failing to report incomes from Hong Kong parking lots and other business. As a U.S. citizen, Cheung is obliged to report incomes from anywhere in the world, even if he does not reside in the United States. The law is uncommon in other countries. Cheung insists that he relied on the advice of his tax consultant, and did not know he was supposed to report the income in question.[7]
Experts have said that ignorance of the U.S. tax policy is common among U.S. expatriates; the U.S. government generally does not pursue investigations of failures to report overseas income for non-residents. When discovered, offenders are often simply requested to turn in the unpaid tax. It is unknown why the U.S. government chose to investigate Cheung, and further to pursue a federal grand jury indictment; journalists have suspected ulterior motives.[8]
Originally a professor at University of Hong Kong, because of the extradition agreements between the US and Hong Kong, Cheung has since stayed in mainland China, a country that has no such agreements with America. He now writes books and works as a columnist for the China website ifeng.com. Occasionally, he pays visits to various universities in mainland China.
From 1998 to 2003, Steven Cheung’s company, Steven N. S. Cheung Inc. had a subsidiary in Seattle called Thesaurus Fine Arts, which specialized in Asian antique pieces. The store closed when a series of investigative reports in the Seattle Times alleged that many of the antiques were fake.[citation needed] In 2004, the Washington State Attorney General filed consumer fraud charges against Thesaurus Fine Arts. In 2005, Thesaurus Fine Arts settled for up to $550,000 in fines, attorney fees, and restitution. Cheung was dropped from the case as a result. Cheung has denied ownership of Thesaurus. Thesaurus is a subsidiary of Steven N. S. Cheung Inc., but it is claimed that Cheung is “not an officer, director or shareholder” of Thesaurus.
(3) Law review articles are generally and with good reason considered a joke by the rest of academia, but I will say this: Law review articles are unlikely to include this kind of thing, because the student editors actually read the cited sources, to check whether they say what the author says they say. This is made possible by the economics of law review publishing, which involves employing students who are paid in professional prestige rather than money to check authors’ work. Hey there’s probably an economics article in there somewhere.
(4) Cheung et. al. should have just claimed they were doing ethnography rather than economics.