What is an economist? Cartoon Edition

This is the second post in the series "What is an Economist?"

I am re-posting this cartoon from Greg Mankiw's blog because I enjoyed it so much. I also thought it fit well with this series.

Click picture to enlarge

From time to time this cartoon will pop into my head during class as we are discussing spurious assumptions that are made for economic theories and models. One of the wonderful things about economics is that models are usually built off of "reasonable" assumptions and proven laws of economics. Then we see where those assumptions lead us. Hopefully to some conclusions that we can cleverly test with real-world data. If those assumptions turn out to be unreasonable or flat-out wrong, we should go back and adjust our models.

What this cartoon points out, I think, is a major problem in many fields, but specifically in econ. Economists must be willing to go back and adjust assumptions and models to conform to real-world data and observations... If the catapult doesn't work, maybe a better strategy structure would be a bridge!