103.

At first, Brown University students might be proud that their school has eliminated tuition altogether for students whose families earn less than $60k a year. Diversity! Inclusivity! Other 'ities' that universities fell affinities for!

But wait until you get a little further down the press release, because this is where you learn Brown is raising tuition for everyone else, by a whopping 3.9%. The new cost of a Brown undergraduate degree: nearly $50k per annum.


But it's ok, you think, because poor(er!) people no longer have to pay it! In fact, this is correct. The people who must pay are American middle and upper-earners. And that's all part of a process by which America's middle class is becoming its new lower-class.

Many studies have decried that the gap between America's rich and poor is growing, and they're right. The reasons are manifold: immigration, education, outsourcing, global warming, El Nino, the list goes on. But the fine people over at Brown aren't just kicking the dying middle class, they're pre-emptively building it a coffin.

I'd like to get more technical. Economics who look at public goods (and in this case we're treating financial aid like a public good because it's being provided by a single source to a heterogeneous community through an income-based charge roughly comparable to a tax abatement program) have found that when people's preference for a good increases with income (think of the standard Demand curve rising up, up and away) the voter whose opinions win out is the median voter.

Political scientists call this the median voter theorem, and it has a lot of applications.

But what people are now beginning to realize is that the standard Demand curve for a public good doesn't work. In fact, people may have a U-shaped preference curve for a public good. Look at financial aid. The people who want more of it are the upper and lower-income earners. Not the middle class. Why? The lower-income earners want it because they get the benefits without paying the cost. The upper-income earners support it because of humanitarian reasons, but really because for the Hiltons and Ambanis of the world an extra 3.9% of $27k is so much chaff in the wind.

The people who bear the burden of the increase are the middle-earners. People who went to college, who make between $100- and $250,000 a year, who support 2 or more children through college, and who almost invariably pay the entire cost of tuition out-of-pocket. The sort of person the average humanities/communications/etc college graduate can look to become in the next few years.

What are they going to do about the extra 3.9%??

What's most likely is that they're going to start sending their kids to state colleges, a trend that's already begun but is very likely to continue. Even among the very smart kids I went to high school with (#11 in the US, yeah) many went to University of Maryland for free. Their parents simply couldn't afford private school.

The reason they couldn't afford it is because they were too rich for financial aid, too poor for tuition.

This may seem like a bogus dilemma. After all, the wealth of nations is meant to be recycled, even Adam Smith knew that. But in the meantime, what happens to America's middle class? The progressives, the taxpayers, the median voters, the so-called dreamers and occasional achievers of the American Dream? Is their economic relevance dying away? Are we going to become a nation of short order cooks and hedge fund managers, with little middle ground?

102.

Does anyone remember, back in the sixth grade, when Bath & Body Works had just opened? And the idea of putting a scent - cucumber, melon, cucumber & melon - into everything from soap to candles was revolutionary and new?

Now, the homeless guy on the street outside my window wears chocolate pomade.

I, for one, hate the smell of these cheap perfumes. Making a good perfume is an art, and with the success of B&BW, all kinds of charlatans got in on the act. The result was the cheap over-odorification of all forms of public space. These scents were poorly conceived, poorly executed and - surprise, surprise - poorly received.

People hate , schmaltz-y sweet scents. I hate them. I hate walking past a girl who smells like a Starbucks Latte, one of those tweed-y haired teens who thinks her milkshake smell brings all the boys to the yard.

But unlike an (apparently) growing number of women, I don't think the answer is to step away from the spritzer altogether. After all, when worn properly, a good perfume can be lingering, beguiling, and - yes - seductive. It's the difference between smelling a Cinnabon from across the street and remembering, vaguely, a garden you passed years ago when you were walking from one place to another.

If sight is the sense that begets attraction, then smell is the sense that creates memory. I still remember when Scarlett's mother died, in Gone With the Wind, and for months afterward Scarlett couldn't shake the smell of "lemon verbena satchet" from her mind. I remember when I was little, my sister and I would remember the smell of some of my mother's silk saris - the smell of India is what we called it. A mix of spices and the strong starch that the tailors of her youth used to press in by hand.

Even now, the smell of a strong perfume I wore in Italy reminds me of that trip. And the smell of a particular hand sanitizer I took to Costa Rica reminds me of that trip. It's a subtle, beneath-the-skin reminder. It takes me a moment to remember what, exactly, I'm remembering.

And that's what a good perfume should be like. A memory before it even fades.
Something that works with and enhances someone's natural skin. Theirs, but also different. An olfactory signature.

101.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman and all-around economics guy Alan Greenspan recently suggested that the United States declared war on Iraq not because of WMD, but because of oil.

Of course, underage hippies have been shouting the same thing at the White House steps for years (I should know, I did it) but of course, it's news when Greenspan says it.

There's a lot of economic reasoning supporting this argument, and I think most economists would agree that oil had as much to do with the war as WMD (if it's not one three-letter word, it's another) Just like most economists would agree that the invisible hand is not (surprise!) self-regulating in the real world, and that the minimum wage encourages unemployment. These are facts, if you define facts as: something a lot of well-read people with a penchant for numbers either agree on or fight like horny cats about.

The moral is: is it wrong for the United States to invade a sovereign nation just to get our paws on its wells? Umm...ok, assuming this is not wrong, is it wrong to ask hundreds of thousands of American citizens to give up their lives because it's too damn difficult to conserve energy? Well, let's assume that it's inevitable. And it is, as anyone who's familiar with Marx will tell you. The "Old Kritz" was right about one thing: it is inevitable that the world will sing to the tune of money.

Put another way: today, I was walking down the street when I saw a guy in a massive SUV with about twenty yellow "Support Our Troops" stickers stuck to his bumper. And I thought to myself, If you really supported our troops, you'd be riding a bike.

And then I thought, If I really gave a damn about the troops, I wouldn't be invoking the phrase 'support our troops' to guzzle gas, lie about the war, or make a point on an untrafficked blog page.

But then again, if I really gave a damn about the troops, I wouldn't be much of an American.

100.

Hmm. So I thought that after my Human Sex lecture on Thursday, I'd scraped the bottom of the "weird psychological disorders" barrel. But then I heard about Caligynephobia. Apparently, this disorder is the reason that the hottest women in bars almost never get hit on (really? I think this depends on how much alcohol has been served) and also the reason that beautiful German women (Heidi Klum) invariably end up married to foreigners (Seal.)

The symptoms: "breathlessness, dizziness, dry mouth, excessive sweating, nausea, feeling sick, shaking, heart palpitations, inability to speak or think clearly, a fear of becoming mad or losing control, a sensation of detachment from reality or a full blown anxiety attack" in the presence of attractive women.

Urban Dictionary has a slightly different term for the same condition.

The causes vary, of course. For borderline sufferers, they arise from the fact that "a beautiful woman undermines the illusion that one is leading a happy life" but for others, the roots run into the murky past, when one had an experience that "linked beautiful women and emotional trauma."

At the risk of sounding like an asshole: doesn't extreme attraction sometimes feel like an emotional trauma? I'm sure for some people this is a legitimate disorder, but do you notice there's no accompanying "Adonisophobia" or whatever you might call it?

I think it's pretty normal to be uncomfortable - and in some people's cases, catastrophically physically uncomfortable - around people you're attracted to. The solution, of course, is to hit on them constantly until you're immune.

Or at least, that's what I imagine the solution would be. The other solution is to date unattractive women until one day you catch sight of a gorgeous girl on the street and your whole life falls apart at the seams.

And I suppose this goes for both sexes.