|A Rube Goldberg Cartoon|Thursday, January 30, 2020Art Dahlberg or Rube Goldberg? Rube Goldberg machine is a comically complicated contraption designed to perform a simple task. Goldberg began drawing his cartoon machines in 1914 and continued until 1964. The economic relationships Dahlberg tried to explain are indeed extraordinarily complex. It is doubtful that his diagrams helped readers to understand them -- unless the point Dahlberg was trying to make was that the relationships were extraordinarily complex. It should be noted that economists A.W. Phillips (Phillips Curve) and Irving Fisher both also constructed elaborate machines to model the economy.