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In This Issue

• What To Do With Books
• Craigslist Finds New Ways to Disturb
• Ovary Mining: Profit In Your Pants
• Letters to the Feditors
• Experience? Uh, no
• Sitting On Babies?
• The Internet = Porn. Porn = The Fed. Logically...
• "Which Came First, the Chicken or the Dregs?"
• Hey, Athletes! Need a Team? Call Me Ishmael.
• Hot Sex? Meh. Mock Interviews? Ooo Yeah, Baby.
• Swipe, Suffer, Suffocate
• From The Desk of Lee "El Cuisinart" Bollinger
• Practice Protectionism in the Bedroom
• Living at the Speed of 2.99x10^8 m/s
• Sensitivity Training Averts Termination
• Congrats, You're Fucked
• The Hierarchy of Columbia
• THEY Watch

Economics is one of those useful subjects that allows the people who study it to get a job after college. For you humanities majors though, it can be confusing because it involves doing math, understanding graphs, and having a grasp of basic logic. So I’m going to explain economics with an analogy most of you are familiar with: condoms.

Economics comes down to two great buzz words: supply and demand! The first thing you need to understand is supply. Condoms are supplied by RAs (for the most part). Because RAs don’t know jack shit about economics , they supply condoms for free. In economics, the only motive people have to supply anything is to make money. A smart RA doesn’t care if you get gonorrhea, herpes, or knocked up. Instead she worries about not having a $100,000 debt load and a useless degree when she graduates. This means that the more money your RA makes per condom, the more of them she’ll supply to you. Thus, if provided with the proper incentive (i.e. if she gets 100 bucks per condom), she’ll be properly motivated to supply you, the consumer, with condoms. In math this is called a directly proportional relationship, or to put it more simply, it means “mo’ money, mo’ condoms.”

The complementary idea to supply is demand. Just as suppliers want to make money, demanders (a.k.a. you) want to be as cheap as possible. Now let’s say each condom costs ten dollars. You’d stop buying condoms because you’re cheap and you’d rather get syphilis or the clap than spend ten dollars on a condom. This is called an inversely proportional relationship. If you can’t figure out what that means from the context, then you’re beyond help.

The point at which the number of condoms your RA is willing to supply equals the amount you want to buy is called the “equilibrium point.” I understand that “equilibrium” sounds really scientific and science is scary, so let’s just call it the happy point. At the happy point, you’ll buy enough condoms to engage in safe sex and your RA will exert the necessary effort required to steal them from Health Services. You get to have sex (or more likely, jerk off into a condom), your RA makes some pocket money, and no fetuses get aborted. As an economist would say, this is a non-zero-sum game.

Changes in supply can upset the happy point. For example, let’s say ten-year-old children in Malaysia start going to school. That means they can’t spend their days making condoms, and that causes an international condom shortage. RAs will have more difficulties acquiring condoms, and prices go up. Sadly, the happy point is shifted to a far more melancholy point, increasing the cost of condoms and the amount of coitus interruptus on campus.

Changes in demand can also cause a shift in the happy point. This can happen two ways. First, there could be an increase in the use of complements. A complement is something you use with the condom, such as sex. Let’s say Absolut vodka made a really big donation to the Republican National Committee. To return the favor, President Bush would reduce the drinking age to 18. This would increase drinking on campus, which would increase the amount of sex. Finally, this would increase the demand for condoms. The happy point is made infinitely more delightful because more condoms are used.

Second, there could be an increase in the use of substitutes for condoms. A substitute is something you use instead of a condom, like the pill, abortions, or abstinence. For example, let’s say hypothetically that religious fanatics run our country. That would lead to an increase in abstinence-only sex education. That, in turn, would lead to promise rings and abstinence pledges. Initially, sex would decrease, and then unprotected sex would begin to rise. This all leads to less condom use, or a “decrease in condom demand,” to use the jargon of economics.

And so ends our economics lesson. Hopefully you’ve learned something that will help you job prospect-less people get a job or at least laid. If you haven’t, you can always come “work” for me when I’m a billionaire condom tycoon.