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”…

This sharp joke captures one of the key critiques that economic sociology consistently raises toward mainstream economics: the persistent tendency of economic theories to abstract away from immediate realities and concrete social conditions. By “assuming a can opener,” conventional economics often assumes away the very fabrics of everyday life — power relations, inequality, moral norms, institutional arrangements, and the social contexts in which economic action takes place. When elegant models replace the messy complexity of lived experience, assumptions become wretched substitutes for politics, history, and culture. Economic sociology insists on reversing this move: grounding economic reasoning in social relations, material constraints, and cultural settings, and observing human behavior as it actually unfolds rather than as it is imagined within frictionless, idealized, and therefore erroneous, models in economics. 

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