Emerald City Mayhem

You might remember this from a few years ago. At the time, I brushed it off a bit. Consumer fraud happens from time to time, and quite frankly if you're not getting soused in the parking lot pre-game and then smuggling in a flask, you're not appreciating the sport the way God intended.

This morning, I revisited my brush-off. The NFL and its subsidiaries have something of a reputation for being fiercely protective of the goodwill in their intellectual property. Cheerleaders' handbooks are notorious for their meticulous attention to minutiae, down to extremely basic intimate personal hygiene issues. Deflategate was HUGE news, penetrating even my stubborn indifference to pro sports. Hell, the Greatest Deliberative Body in the World™ has been known to directly intervene into the professional sports industries. It seems as if fraud or negligence of this sort should be all but impossible. Risking the alienation of customers over concessions is simply bad business. Recall that the absurdly high prices of refreshments at places like cinemas and sporting events are a way for firms to allow customers to voluntarily reveal whether they are marginal or inframarginal customers: everyone pays the basic tariff (adjusted for the quality of the seating) and then retains the option of paying extra for the convenience of gorging on stearic acid and simple carbohydrates for the duration. I suppose that the above video is merely an extension of the underlying economic logic. Inframarginal customers are less likely to bother checking whether or not their already wildly overpriced vaguely beerlike piss-swill sizes are sufficiently different to justify the surcharge. After all, if you were prudent with your finances, you wouldn't buy yak squeezins at... hang on, let me check... CenturyLink Field (when last I lived there, Seahawks Stadium was called Qwest Field (ugh)).

So, no individual patron of interest has much incentive to bother doing a beer size QA check. They're primarily there to watch the Hawks get embarrassed yet again. But repeat small probability events enough times, and the above video becomes a near certainty. You can't fool all the people all the time. By backwards induction, you shouldn't even try.

I'm a bit puzzled then. Is my model of the NFL misaligned? Can the Hawks' concession service really be that obtuse? Why is the NFL so incredibly uptight about propriety elsewhere but they let crap like this slide? What am I missing?

NCAA

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill:

Congrats to Duke,but I was rooting for team who had stars that are actually going to college & not just doing semester tryout for NBA.
— Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) April 7, 2015

Duke Political Science Professor Meat Mountain Mungowitz:

Odd for Sen. McCaskill to critique Duke, w/ consistent 100% grad rate. http://t.co/aYCPi8Z9Q4 But maybe I just prefer Sens who can read
— Michael Munger (@mungowitz) April 7, 2015

 And

Over last decade Wisconsin's men's basketball GSR consistently less than Duke's GSR. So Wisconsin just exploits its players, and LONGER.
— Michael Munger (@mungowitz) April 7, 2015

Exploits?

@Spivonomist "Oh, no, we can't pay you. It's a RULE. Oh, and you won't graduate, either." DEF'ly not EE.
— Michael Munger (@mungowitz) April 7, 2015

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." -A. Smith

NCAA is a bit like a lottery. You get a break on tuition for a shot at the NBA. In return, the players provide an extremely valuable service to punters at highly-subsidized prices.

I'm curious though: is there an implied bait-and-switch? The decision to pursue a career in the NBA is made at a very early age. To be a pro athlete, you have to commit well before the legal age of consent. If you're not on the court day in and day out starting from elementary school, you probably won't hack it. Implied promises of fame and fortune lead kids into a rent contest.

Then again, politics is also a zero-sum rent contest. There are only 100 senators. If we seek to discourage hoop dreams, it's only reasonable to discredit the offices of state and actively shame anyone so dishonorable to seek election.

Now that's a euvoluntary exchange I can get behind.

It's Just Not Cricket

"I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town."
-Canada Bill Jones

EC at OB has written a bit on the NZPF's penchant for malingering at cricket matches, collaring "courtsiders," folks who take advantage of broadcast lag to gain an edge in overseas betting markets.

Crampton directs his comments towards the impropriety of directing professional police to the task of monitoring what is, at worst, a petty civil offense (terms and conditions of ticket sales scarcely rising to the severity of trespass), but I admit to being utterly flummoxed that courtsiding can even happen at all.

From what I gather, here's how it works: sports matches are televised on a delay. Text messages are not. If one team obtains an advantage not reflected in the running odds, quick-fingered punters can get their overseas confederates to place an OT bet ahead of the broadcast. It's simple timing arbitrage. Horse racing overcomes this by closing the betting window based on the time at the track. Whether you're in Vegas or Dubai, if the race starts at 4:22 Kentucky time, windows around the world snap shut at 4:20 Kentucky time. Perhaps there's something different about sports betting that precludes this obvious remedy, but it seems that if there is such a blatant arbitrage opportunity, that bettors without on-site confederates would either loudly insist on closing the window early or would find another game of chance.

I can see why the ICC (or FIFA, or the NFL, or what-have you) has a professional interest in curbing courtsiding. Betting arbitrage creates obvious incentives for athletes to intentionally scupper matches, ruining the experience for the ordinary punters. Still, it's a long leap from that to "therefore we should employ the people whose job it ordinarily is to chase down murderers and thieves to monitor the fine print on our tickets." Ordinary daily economizing urges people to obtain desired results at the lowest cost. Why not simply append to each broadcast the duration of the delay? Anyone watching and betting on the match overseas would then have all the information they need to refrain from taking a sucker's bet. The problem is therefore solved much more cheaply.

So what's the deal? Why waste the time and talent of New Zealand's Finest when a timestamp would do the trick? A couple of possibilities:

• The Canada Bill Jones effect: gambling itself is just so enjoyable for some people that they're willing to put up with a crooked game. Publishing the delay wouldn't effect betting behavior in the targeted regions.
• Low-information participants: a delay length message is sort of a coded signal to savvy gamblers that there might be something afoot. Naive gamblers wouldn't parse the signal from the noise. Undercover cops hauling you out by the lobe of your ear is a hard-to-ignore message.
• The thing itself: the purpose of having cops at the match is to have cops at the match. The ICC knows the logic of prohibition, they have estimated the social costs of taking police off their normal beat, and they still decide that the scoffers of their private law need a good truncheoning. 
• Aesthetics: venues don't like the idea that people are buying tickets for venal purposes. My null hypothesis is that objections to things like ticket scalping, pro sports betting, and seat squatting arises from a purity sentiment. Sports leagues put a lot of organizational capital into the public perception that sports are fair, unbiased competition of human achievement. Concerts, magic shows, ballet... the focus is the performance. Reducing seating arrangements to an auction like one does for livestock or the work of dead artists cheapens the performance by dint of association. People don't like to have their work co-opted, and this holds for organizations as well as it does for individuals.

Though I'm fond of the aesthetics hypothesis, it's tough to test. This is one of those areas where the natural human penchant for ex post justification and kayfabe flourish. I might be able to wrest a confession from a commissioner given enough time, but trying to find it in publicly-available data is probably a fool's errand. 

At any rate, the optimist might look at the Kiwi example and rejoice: there's so little crime in New Zealand that they can afford to pull cops off the street and send them to be lackey gumshoes for a professional sports organization. A society so peaceful and anodyne that they can get away with turning beat police into discount mall cops must obviously be a pleasant society indeed.

Betting may or may not be euvoluntary. But betting with full information must surely be more euvoluntary than betting with asymmetric information. The ICC and bookies worldwide are behooved to consider carefully what the cheapest remedy might be.

Pay Structure, Rent Contests, and Euvoluntary Institutions; Angus on the NBA

Click all the way through for KPC plankowner Kevin Grier's thoughts on how the NBA pay structure affects the final product you see on your TV screen or in the arena.

It's a good exercise in analytical economics to follow incentives and institutions through to their logical conclusions, and this includes not just current teams and their players, but potential future players as well.

One thing that puzzles me a bit is how it is the world has any decathletes. To the best of my knowledge, there is nowhere in the world a professional decathlon league. The training required to achieve the physical conditioning needed to be an effective decathlete carries with it a massive opportunity cost. If you have the natural talent required to excel at the 100-metre dash, running long jump, shot put, high jump, 400-metre run, 110-metre hurdles, discus throw, pole vault, javelin throw, and 1,500-metre run, you probably also have the natural talent required to excel at rugby, cricket, soccer, baseball, or other sport where you could earn considerable returns in both direct salary and endorsements. Amazingly, we still see, every four years, a slew of humans good enough at each of these events to compete internationally in the Olympics. Why is it that people still train in athletic events like this when they could make a far more comfortable living as even a third-string wide receiver in the NFL?

So what's the deal? To anyone but an economist, the answer is obvious: love of the sport. It's a wide world (of sports) and some people love track and field (or Greco-Roman wrestling, or what-have-ye) enough that they're perfectly willing to forgo participation in the rent contest that is pro sports. This should tell us something about the other side: it's likely that there are inframarginal big league athletes: they are telling the unvarnished truth when they say they're in it for the love of the game.

Here's the question I have. Assuming that the same sorts of tech trends that are gutting the world of print and music will sooner or later turn their inevitable electronic eye towards pro sports, what will happen to the incentives faced by young people?

The overarching purpose of information-age tech is to reduce transaction costs. Uber matches passengers with drivers. AirBnB matches travelers with hosts. I'm not sure what it would look like, but Uber for hockey doesn't seem all that outrageous. Even the atavistic tribalism evoked by local teams can probably be reproduced without all the organizational baggage of a formal league structure. Probably. And with free agency, the superstar effect Angus mentions would likely become a lot more powerful.

But the kids? Would kids put all the blood, sweat, and broken teeth into the game as they do now?

Maybe. Maybe not. It seems likely that the ones who do are all in it for the love of the game, for the glory. What if instead of European soccer, the incentive model for US pro sports were something like Shaolin kung fu? Would the games be better? Worse? For those kids who would otherwise be indulging hoop dreams, what would they do instead?

Consider the possibility that one of the knock-on effects of the NBA/NFL/MLB compensation structure is that it lures, on the margin, kids away from drugs and crime and towards a low-p, high-return activity. How might you test this hypothesis?

Pay to Play: There's Bologna in our Tight End

The first time I recall learning about Pay or Play contracts was from the Animaniacs theme song. I was surprised to find that it's a real thing.

And now we find that a related contract (long in use in the exotic dancing circuit) has been floated for the Superb Owl: big name artists are being asked to pay (follow the links! follow the links!) for the privilege of performing at halftime.

The idea is pretty simple: Rihanna gets a bigger boost in sales out of the gig than the NFL does, so remuneration flows accordingly. Fair is fair, after all.

Of course, fair isn't fair when one party to the contract is a giant organization. If Forbes is correct, the 32 teams in the NFL are worth, in toto, close to $46B. Rihanna, in contrast, is worth a (relatively) measly $120M. Talk about a BATNA disparity!

Sure, there are probably only a handful or two of bankable performers who'd be a good fit for the Superb Owl halftime show (for my money, it's long past time for Weird Al to hit the stage), and each one of them is more than well-off enough to tell the NFL to stick it where the sun don't shine.

But the brutal economics don't lie. If a performer gives up the spot to someone with a little less pride, it could well mean leaving money on the table. What price pride? The typical high-performing musician has much less audience goodwill to squander than the NFL, and maybe that's what Goodell's counting on.

It's tough to feel sorry for a mammoth organization with abundant assets, even when they have the economics on their side.

Then again, it's just an offer at this point, right? Lowballing is a common practice in negotiation. Maybe they'll agree to bump it up to 0. Who knows?

Cage Match: Hume vs Aristotle in the Arena of Justice

Much of what we write about here at EE is underpinned by a tacit appeal to an ordinary sense of justice. Justice is the virtue offended when exchange veers from the confines of the euvoluntary world, and justice is the grand dame who hangs her head in despair when men seek improper dominion over their fellows. Justice is also the chief among the so-called pagan virtues, which helps explain why several intellectual traditions yearn to lay claim to its definition. I assure you that if you have a tough time trying to reconcile notions of divine justice and social justice, you are not alone. There's justice in thought, justice in deed, justice in outcome, justice as fairness... it's all quite Procrustean. And as with such things, the confusion and general disorder found in the wider society has a pedigree in the academy.

Consider this case (h/t T. Gill). The short version is that a guy in Nevada is riled up because the NFL and Ticketmaster won't sell Hawks tickets in the Silver State. There's an injustice in public funds going towards stadium construction, when the public at large is restricted from enjoying the spoils of the project. Without arguing the specific merits of the "lawsuit", or even the economics of the complaint, let's instead visit a brief conversation I overheard while in a bar in earshot of Aristotle and David Hume.

Aritstotle: Not that I'm a fan of the Seahawks or anything, but you'd figure that if the NFL had a passing familiarity with justice, they'd make their tickets available to any customer, not just the ones in the Pacific Northwest.

Hume: "Passing" familiarity, eh Ari? Cute. I'm not sure I understand your objection though. It's not like Ticketmaster and the NFL are gaining at the expense (your words, my friend [N.E. V.2]) of this dude in Nevada.

Aristotle: Oh, so you've read me then? Great. Then you surely read the very next passage dealing with proportionality. Justice is just insofar as it is proportional. I don't argue that playground fairness has to rule, that in an exchange both parties must in all times, places, and circumstances distribute the gains from exchange even-steven 50-50 equal, but rather something more like the old barnyard aphorism that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. The just is a species of the proportionate. There's nothing inherent to Nevada residency that warrants exclusion here.

Hume: Well, I'll readily admit that you do avoid the traps of relying on vulgar, peripatetic philosophies of justice, but I still think you're missing something important.

Aristotle: Oh? What's that?

Hume: The artifice of it.

Aristotle: Go on.

Hume: Remember what I wrote in my Treatise? Property arises from sense and sentiment. It is a product of enterprise, and any sense of justice so enjoyed is found in the relations between human minds. This distraught guy in Nevada has entirely misapprehended the nature of the offer if he thinks these organizations owe him consideration.

Aristotle: I'm with you to some extent. We're discussing the nature of voluntary acts, and in that regard, we needn't split hairs about restoring to this guy something that was taken from him. I urge you to review my third question in Book V: "whether it is the man who has assigned to another more than his share that acts unjustly."

Hume: Well, it so happens that I have my copy handy, so while I'm dong that, why don't you review what I noted in Part II, Section VI about the shimmering, insensate border between justice and injustice?

At this point in the conversation, Where Is My Mind by The Pixies came on the jukebox, and their murmurs got drowned out. Which I think was okay since they were mostly reading anyway. Here, enjoy:



Hume: "It is plain too that the distributor acts unjustly, but not always the man who has the excessive share; for it is not he to whom what is unjust appertains that acts unjustly, but he to whom it appertains to do the unjust act voluntarily, i.e. the person in whom lies the origin of the action, and this lies in the distributor, not in the receiver... he who gets an excessive share does not act unjustly, though he 'does' what is unjust."

Aristotle: "If we consider the ordinary course of human actions, we shall find, that the mind restrains not itself by any general and universal rules; but acts on most occasions as it is determined by its present motives and inclination. As each action is a particular individual event, it must proceed from particular principles, and from our immediate situation within ourselves, and with respect to the rest of the universe. If on some occasions we extend our motives beyond those very circumstances, which gave rise to them, and form something like general rules for our conduct, it is easy to observe, that these rules are not perfectly inflexible, but allow of many exceptions."

Hume: So you're saying that we should judge the NFL and Ticketmaster by their willingness to transact, but not so much simply by their large stores of wealth. That Piketty guy might disagree with you.

Aristotle: And you're saying that we're not especially well suited to judge the merits of this case from afar, since Justice, like other artifice, is subject to deliberative change. I think that Piketty guy might disagree with you, too.

After that, they paid their tab and left, so I missed whatever else they mentioned. But I did have a few lingering questions. Once something exists, is it reasonable to treat it as an endowment? The Roman god Janus had two faces, one looking forward, one looking back. Did each of his faces understand Justice in the same regard? It is plainly unjust in both an Aristotelian and a Humean sense to throttle innovation in the cradle, but shouldn't our sense of justice feel offended at blatant disproportionality in exchange, even if the natural alternative is no exchange whatsoever? Asking in EE terms: if there is no desperation in BATNA, is there justice in barring (ex ante!) disproportional trade under conditions of BATNA disparity? And if so, would this NFL case fit the bill? And is there a Coasean solution that doesn't rely on an embarrassing lawsuit?

Mama always said monopoly rents are like a box of chocolates.

Cheerleading is not Euvoluntary?

Deadspin longform piece on NFL cheerleading. Prepare for BATNA disparity.

ATSRTWT

Evidently, NFL cheerleaders must conform to rather strict guidelines or lose the gig. And the effective hourly rates are straddling the minimum wage line (a point I find tendentious having been in the military where the effective hourly wage for round-the-clock duty days gets in kissing distance of single-digit percentages of the MW). For cheerleading, pro sports is vaguely akin to a monopsony buyer of labor, but only vaguely since you'd have a hard case that cheerleading skills are ever meant to be durable (few accredited universities have cheerleading majors). And the competition is certainly there:

For anyone fed up with constant pressure, scant pay for tons of work, and the requirement that you build your entire schedule around a seasonal part-time job, there's the omnipresent threat of being kicked off the team. "If you don't fall in line and suck it up," says the cheerleader, "there's someone else dumb enough that would replace you."

"Dumb enough". A curious accusation, this. This endeavor appears to be highly competitive, so do all these aspiring cheerleaders form a horde of ignorant bimbos? Maybe I've gotten more compassionate as I age, but I would strongly hesitate to cast aspersions like this. Before calling someone "dumb", I think I'd prefer to gather stronger evidence. Particularly since the women that tend to land gigs like these tend to use the money for university tuition. Though, to be fair, perhaps college attendance is not necessarily the indicator of intellectual quality it might be under other circumstances.

I predict that when it comes to generating a lot of public sympathy, this is a lead balloon. NFL cheerleaders are attractive young women with good career prospects. And as the last graf notes:

Mostly, they do it for Sundays. "The gameday experience—that's what keeps people coming back," says the former cheerleader, who even now gets wistful thinking about those moments on the sideline before kickoff, watching players hype themselves up, looking down the tunnel and seeing Ray Lewis doing his trademark dance. There's nothing quite like it.

In-kind compensation. The sort of in-kind compensation that is unavailable working for any other employer. Frankly, I'm sort of surprised the NFL doesn't charge cheerleaders to be on the field.

Gridpig

On le Twitter, EE pal Adam Gurri asks: "@Spivonomist the concussions in football thing seems like a clearcut case of people being uncomfortable with the BATNAs."

I reply: "@adamgurri BATNA for whom? Players or the audience? Ooh, what are the likely BATNAS? Get ride of helmets and what do we have?"

To which he writeth: "@Spivonomist Players. Argument that "they're choosing to do this, they make serious $$$" not euvoluntary."

There are a few considerations here. The easiest is a cross-sectional game theoretical question. What would happen if the NFL got rid of helmets and pads overnight? The strict game theoretical SPNE is that players would stop making big hits and we'd see something closer to rugby, Aussie-rules footie, or bare-knuckle boxing: more blood, fewer deep-tissue blunt trauma cases. But we know empirically from other rules changes that SPNE predictions under radical rule changes disrupt play heuristics and we'd probably see a lot of chaos for a season or two until players and coaches adjust to the new norms. In the meantime, there would be a lot of broken bones and spinal column damage. That's not all that fun for the fans, I think.

But I don't think that's what Adam's worried about. He's too sophisticated a thinker to bother with something so trivial. No, the real problem is that NFL participation is a rent contest embedded in a human capital development tale, governed by the fickle tickle of Lady Luck. The BATNA for an established NFL player (even a median-earnings player) is unlikely to draw all that much sympathy from the crowd. Yeah sure, there would be some (unpleasant) adjustment costs to reducing football concussions and revenues might suffer for a couple of years, but it does seem worth it, all things considered. But when you think about the problem longitudinally, we're no longer talking about paid professionals, we're talking about little kids in Pop Warner leagues who have to do their arithmetic homework after practice. That generates a whole different set of moral intuitions.

For a pro player, all those years spent doing drills and learning plays are sunk costs. For the kid, they're opportunity costs. And we have a decent inkling from the behavioral literature that people are pretty bad at judging risk and uncertainty, or maintaining reasonable discount rates. Kids even less so. It's far from clear that the very real risk of concussion enters correctly into the decision calculus of whether or not to seriously pursue a sports career.

So I encourage you to pay close attention to how folks sell the idea of rules changes. BATNA estimates look very different depending on which side of the decision node you're sitting. You can expect folks who want to make football more concussion-free to argue ad puerum and the status quo crowd to stress the (rather disastrous) short-term consequences.

Which side is right? Take a good long look at your kids tonight and you tell me.

Here She Comes, Miss Rent Contest.

My regular readers could easily be forgiven for concluding that when I use the term "rents", I mean "political rents." I write about political rents because they tend to be the most salient sort for what I care about. But a rent is simply a return to ownership of a scarce resource. The chief difference between a political rent and other sorts is that a political rent is conjured from dust and spit in the chambers of men to whom have accrued the thaumaturgy of statecraft, an Eblis O'Shaughnessy wrung out of the pleas of constituents.

But are not other rent contests no less contrived? There's nothing in the state of nature that insists on one and only one Stanley Cup or welterweight champion belt or Rubik's Cube Memorial Ziggurat or whatever. I don't actually follow any of this stuff. The point is, endowments of the land and its resources are the joint product of nature's bounty and humanity's industry. Contests like "world's fastest sheep shearer" have nothing so ever to do with the distribution of the surf and the wind, but rather sprout from the rich loam of human imagination alone.

Michael Giberson writes in a Facebook thread about the recent flap over comments on the ethnicity of the 2013 Miss America winner: "don't ban Miss America, but why celebrate or even pay attention to a contest to pick the prettiest young woman in the land? It encourages otherwise talent and ambitious young women to devote their efforts into zero-sum contest for looking pretty instead of working on something of more lasting value."

I'm inclined to agree, even though I've myself been voted "the prettiest girl in IB" by a college of my peers. It's obvious there's an opportunity cost to preening for pageants or for following hoop dreams or for flogging your headshot in the hopes you'll be discovered by a casting director on the mean streets of LA. But in each of these cases, it's less obvious that there are any meaningful net external costs. Sure, by perfecting your makeup technique or your jump shot or your dressage, you're not contributing to the development of your own durable human capital, but it's hard to generate moral outrage against folks who typically don't end up a public burden. If a young woman wants to squander her time on leaning how to walk elegantly in heels or a young man wants to squander his time figuring out how to consistently pick up a 7-10 split (infinitive), it is my impression that you'd need to push on another margin to raise the public hackle. Becoming the world's faster frankfurter scarfer strikes me as more euvoluntary than becoming the world's heftiest dwarf tosser.

There's something close to a unanimity rule when it comes to pageant participation (as in market transactions generally). The same can't be said for taxi medallions or hairdressing licenses. Yes, these young women could be doing something else with their time, but I think the libertarians actually manage to channel (for a change) broader public opinion when they cite the absence of coercion (real coercion a la Hume and Hayek) in the rent contests arising from voluntary association. The key evidence here seems to be the pointed lack of legislative meddling in the by-laws of these voluntary associations.

And the real fruit is in the exceptions to this absence, like when Congress has hearings on performance-enhancing drugs in Major League Baseball. What's the pedestrian moral intuition there? 

World Cup Woe

To get more of something, subsidize it.

An easy enough platitude, yes? Subsidies sound great when the thing subsidized is something everybody wants. Or something enough people want to justify the burden slung on the shoulders of the unwilling. Isn't that the purpose of taxation? To get the free riders to start pedaling? And hey, who doesn't like futbol? What are you, a Yanqui?


 

TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Subsidies aren't free money. They are transfers, often from poor to rich. If professional sports aren't euvoluntary enough to survive on their own merits, then maybe more of us should hit the big orgs like FIFA, the NFL, and the NCAA where it hurts: right smack dab in the pocketbook. We may not have favelas in the States, but we do have a large, nearly unanimous literature that clearly states: "independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development." (Siegfried & Zimbalist, JEP 2000)

We're paying for this through taxes why, exactly?

Yellow Ball

In my previous post on sports, I poked around the euvoluntary edges of sports and poverty. Today, I'd like to share some thoughts on the relationship of sports to education. For a euvoluntaryist, bundled institutions, particularly those supported by tax moneys, should be prima facie suspect. College sports and college education are very much bundled institutions. I wonder if it might be useful to parse the components of the bundle and speculate on arrangements that might move the interested parties closer to the euvoluntary end of the spectrum.

Felted Holes

The 2012 Summer Olympics are a nice time to reflect on the euvoluntarity of sports. Since this is sort of a big topic, I'll try to limit myself to the following points:

1. Scale and its relevance to euvoluntary questions
2. The relationship of schooling and sport
3. Incentives and the perversion thereof

I also think that each point is detailed enough to break up into its own post, so I'll start with the first one today.

A word on my priors. I can't under any common definition be considered a dedicated sports fan. I get a kick out of going to baseball games in person when I get the chance, but I don't watch televised matches and I can't tell you anything about any of the teams or the players. I'm familiar enough with most of the major rules of the major sports to know the difference between a ground rule double and a leg bye (that's from cricket for those readers insufficiently Anglophilic). When younger, I confined my penchant for memorizing irrelevant statistics to characteristics of the creatures found in the Monster Manual. When I elect to exercise of my own volition, I strongly prefer solitary pursuits--I completed a 200 mile bicycle ride from Seattle to Portland a few years back, for example. With that in mind, take my comments as coming from someone who is friendly to the notion of sport, someone who is friendly to large, successful businesses, but someone who is skeptical of overspecialization and downright distrustful of cozy relationships between business owners and state officials.

When Are Incentives Okay?

The NFL and the NEA have very different compensation schemes.

Are the differences appropriate for the differences in context? Or would it be better if football players were paid based on seniority? Or would it be better if teachers got paid based on performance?

Problem: It is possible (mostly) to measure performance in football. In teaching.... ??

(Nod to Jay Larson)