You Have Two Cows: Capitalism Explained With Cows, and Its Origins

The opening of the viral graphic that explains capitalism in different countries with nothing more than two cows. It begins with a traditional version and then moves through national stereotypes from America to New Zealand.

“You have two cows” is one of the oldest running jokes about economics. Each version starts with the same simple setup, a person who owns two cows, and then shows what a particular system or country would do to that person and their animals. The graphic below, shared widely around 2014 under the headline that someone had explained capitalism absolutely perfectly, applies the format to national styles of capitalism, from Wall Street to Tokyo.

The jokes work because cows are easy to picture and easy to count. Strip away the jargon of shares, loans and subsidies, and what remains is a quick caricature of how each economy supposedly behaves. That also makes them stereotypes, which is part of the fun and part of the problem, as we explain at the end.

Where the two cows joke comes from

According to the history collected on Wikipedia, the format dates back to the United States in the 1930s. A 1938 column in the Chicago Daily Tribune credited an early version to a speech by the lawyer Silas Strawn at the Economic Club of Chicago on 29 November 1935, and lists of this kind circulated across the country from around 1936 under the name Parable of the Isms. Those first versions compared socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, capitalism and Roosevelt's New Deal.

Over the following decades the joke kept mutating. People added new isms, then countries, then companies. In the early 2000s it was famously rewritten to mock the accounting tricks behind the collapse of the energy company Enron, and a 2008 version published by Bruce Sterling in Wired ended with the public buying the company's bull, the same punchline that closes the American entry in this graphic.

Traditional and American capitalism

The traditional version is the textbook story: you sell one cow, buy a bull, your herd grows, the wider economy grows with it, and eventually you retire on the income. It describes investment and compound growth in a single sentence.

The American entry is the longest by far, a dizzying chain of letters of credit, debt-for-equity swaps, Cayman Islands companies and transferred milk rights. It is adapted from the Enron-era parodies of creative accounting and offshore structures, and it ends with an annual report claiming more cows than exist and the public buying your bull.

Europe: strikes, mad cows and missing herds

The Australian joke has you force one cow to produce the milk of four until it drops dead, a jab at overwork and short-term thinking. Below it, the French entry has you go on strike because you want three cows, a nod to France's well-known tradition of industrial action.

The Japanese version has you redesign the cows to be tiny and twenty times more productive, then sell cartoon versions called Cowkimon around the world, an obvious play on Pokémon and Japan's reputation for miniaturisation. The German entry re-engineers the cows to live 100 years, eat once a month and milk themselves, poking fun at German engineering.

The British line, “Both are mad”, refers to the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) crisis that hit British farming in the 1980s and 1990s. The Canadian entry turns the cows into moose, one speaking French and one English, with one trying to create a new country, a reference to the Quebec independence debate.

In the Italian version you have two cows but have no idea where they are, so you break for lunch. The Russian entry has you count the herd again and again, getting a different number every time, before giving up and opening another bottle of vodka, a dig at unreliable statistics as much as at drinking.

The Swiss entry has you holding 5,000 cows that belong to other people and charging them for storage, a joke about Swiss banking. The Chinese version boasts full employment with 300 people milking two cows and jails the journalist who reported the real number, while the New Zealand line ends on a cheeky old joke about farmers getting a little too fond of their livestock.

What the joke gets right, and what it leaves out

As satire, the two cows format is brilliant at one thing: showing a single idea in its most extreme form. The American panel really does capture how complex financial structures can hide what a company owns, and the Chinese panel touches on documented concerns about press freedom and official statistics.

But each punchline is a stereotype, not an economic analysis. Real economies mix markets, regulation, public services and trade in ways that no joke about two cows can capture. In a 2006 book on cross-cultural management, Richard Steers and Luciara Nardon even used a version of the joke to illustrate cultural differences, while warning that such humour leans on stereotypes. A fun way to read the graphic is to ask, for each country, what real fact the joke exaggerates and what it conveniently leaves out.

For a serious look at one of the themes behind the joke, explore the related article: Nick Hanauer, TED and the Debate About Job Creation.

Did Oscar Wilde say “make them laugh”?

This graphic is often shared together with the line “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you”, credited to Oscar Wilde. We could not find it in Wilde's works, and it does not appear on Wikiquote's page of his sourced or disputed quotations, so it is best described as a saying often attributed to him.

Wilde did write something in a similar spirit. His 1894 collection Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young includes the line “If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.” That is a genuine quote, and it fits the two cows joke rather well.

The cow graphic itself reached many readers through the site Why Don't You Try This in November 2014; its original author is unknown.

Sources: Wikipedia, You have two cows; Wikiquote, Oscar Wilde; Why Don't You Try This (2014).

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