MAJORNOMICS

You guys are lazy. Also, there’s a really good pun in this post; just wait.

I foresee what we in the biz call a “big weekend” coming up, so I think I’ll indulge myself in the contemporary hyper-intellectual’s favorite pastime: a bullshit, pseudo-Marxist critique of a social institution, mixed—of course—with the pernicious flavor of self-awareness you’ve already grown tired of from Old Major. Also, the only social institution in which I’m interested is parties.

Because I’ve just today taken an exam in Microeconomics, the parallels between the role of the firm and the role of the party organizers is lodged in my mind. (An aside: my Microeconomics teacher is dick-chafingly hot. As in, if I wear jeans in that class I’ll regret it for a week. She only wears like size -6 Levi’s and t-shirts that are adorably FOB (assuming, that is, that Turks arrive in the US via boat).) From a supply-side perspective, the production function of a firm is dictated by the factors of production, generally simplified to K=capital and L=labor, so that Q(K,L).

Similarly for parties, but let’s define the variables differently: Q is quality rather than quantity, K is party capital rather than monetary capital, and L is still labor, though more in a “do work” sense than a do work sense. In micro, the general approach to this problem is to combine the production function and the budget constraint (I=(wage)L+(rent)K) to determine the optimal allocation of resources between the factor of production.

This model breaks down in our case, though, because the microeconomic assumption that money can be freely divided between L and K does not hold in our case; discounting the potentially-worth-exploring category of strippers, money can only be used to increase K. In order to develop a new model, I propose a reexamination of the factors of production of a party.

Rather than the vague variable L, let’s introduce three more specific variables: people the party organizers can comfortably invite via facebook, call it GP for gross popularity; people who come to the party, call it P; and the per capita “will to party,” call it WP. Additionally, we can say that K=c$, where $ is the total expendable income of the organizers and c is the marginal propensity to party.

So, in the short run, we can say that GP is exogenous to the model because popularity cannot grow by any appreciable fraction in a few days, and also because talking about popularity is just embarrassing. Now we need to determine how our variables are related.
P, the people who come to the party, is surely a function of GP and K; in fact, let’s let P=GP/(1+9e^K). My choice of 9 is arbitrary but I think it plays out pretty well in reality. For example, if K=0, P=.1(GP), so only 10% of people you invite show up. As K approaches infinity, however, (1+9e^K) approaches 1, and P approaches GP; in that case, everyone you invite shows up.

WP is also related to K, but here I’ll introduce one final piece of notation, A, which is the Awesomeness of the occasion for the party such that A={1,2…10}, where 1 is “Oh dope I still have 4 stones in the fridge from Hipster Night and The Price Is Right is on” and 10 is “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD ETHEL IS TURNING 21.” I’ve derived the equation so that WP=A*(K^1.5). So, keeping in mind that it is obviously better to party on better occasions, A is pretty much constant; there are only a finite number of 10s IN YOUR LIFE SO USE THEM WISELY. Note also that the relationship between WP and K is not linear. Each unit of K increases the value of all previous units of K in the case of WP because it helps to escalate the party and loosen inhibitions, which in turn encourages more drinking, looser inhibitions, and so on.

So that leaves us with a General Equation of Partying such that Q=WP*P. Let me note here that it MAY BE POSSIBLE for a party to get too good—I’ve theorized something I call the Asymptote of Police Involvement, but that, my friends, is the subject of another paper. Substitution into our General Equation yields:

Q= GP * A * (K^1.5) / (1 + (e^K))

Since GP and A are both very difficult to change, it becomes abundantly clear that the only real way to improve Party Quality is to increase K.

FUNNY.

THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG.

REAPPROPRIATE THE CAPITAL FROM THE BOURGEOISIE.

LET ME START

BY REAPPROPRIATING

THE

CAPITALS.

No but seriously I’m super psyched for this weekend.

Old Major