On the basis of this Professor Mazzucato seems entirely unaware of even the simplest findings of the subject she herself is a professor of:
Imagine explaining to a Martian how, on Earth, grown men kicking a ball around a pitch earn so much more than heart surgeons, let alone school teachers (both who save and improve lives). Odd.
— Mariana Mazzucato (@MazzucatoM) June 1, 2019
As our Swindon correspondent explains:
“Well, the simple answer is that it’s about supply and demand. Lots of people want Messi, Neymar and Ronaldo to play for them, they have deep pockets, and so they get into a bidding war and pay huge amounts of money.
Sport exacerbates this because the key deliverable of a sportsman is beating other sportsmen. It isn’t like hiring teachers. The teachers who are 90% as good as the best teachers are still worthwhile having. They still deliver something people want. Maybe they get a lower salary, but it’s likely to be reasonably proportionate – they get 90% of the salary of the best teachers. Because being the best is intrinsic to success in sport, everyone prizes the very top players.
You see this reflected in salaries as they are not linear but exponential. In 2018, Chelsea, the champions had a wage bill of £219m. By the time you get to Southampton in 8th place, it was around half that, at £112m. Relegated clubs were around £64m. The average in the Championship is around half that. When you get past that, to the likes of Swindon Town and Rushden and Diamonds they’re earning less than a doctor, let alone a surgeon. We don’t value most players that highly.”
There’s even a whole section of labour economics which looks at this very point. Tournament economics. Which explains why all the revenues and then some from the top sporting teams flow through to the players, the owners don’t make a profit. Which then further explains why the cartels in American sports do ensure that capitalist profit, why the UEFA “fair play” rules are there to limit capitalist losses in pursuit of titles and so on.
This is actually a point that Ms. Mazzucato’s own profession has discussed, explored and nailed down. At which stage just enjoy the sight of a public intellectual admitting total ignorance of the point under discussion.
And Mariana doubles down:
Funny how non economists love/preach simplistic "supply & demand". I wrote "martian" because its crazy & against common sense. The fact some countries do cap sports salaries, and/or share revenues between teams, shows its not deterministic, but societal choice. Markets are made! https://t.co/1J7ySfQeXU
— Mariana Mazzucato (@MazzucatoM) June 2, 2019
We do actually know all of this. Much research has been done. Even papers written.
The effect of capping the players’ wages is to increase the profits of the owners. Mazzucato is actually arguing in favour of the capitalists gaining at the expense of the workers, of increasing the expropriation of their labour by hand and mind. Which is an interesting thing for a progressive to be arguing, isn’t it.
Her follow up tweet is even worse…
https://twitter.com/MazzucatoM/status/1135154029905031168
And she really doesn’t get the numbers issue. I pay more for nurses than I pay for footballers each year. There’s just a really, really large number of nurses to spread that payment between, and a very small number of footballers. And there are literally billions in other countries paying our footballers and not on of them paying our nurses – because they don’t use them!
Yes. She missed the fact that the vast majority of nurses get paid. The vast majority of footballers do not. We value nurses, roughly, equality, we value footballers very much inequality.
Who? [fires up Google] “She is a professor at University College London in Economics of Innovation and Public Value.” So not a real professor of economics at all, just another professional overpaid SJW.
And we pay garbage collectors considerably less than heart surgeons, yet the damage to health would be more quickly noticed and widespread affecting everyone without garbage collectors, than without heart surgeons where the effect on health would be limited.
You can ignore or dispute supply and demand. You could do that with the law of gravity. But it applies to you anyway.
From The Telegraph review of The Logic of Life by Tim Harford: Harford is usually very fond of economic incentives as a means of improving life. But he isn’t blind to the fact that they can go hilariously wrong. The great pole-vaulter Sergei Bubka was paid a cash bonus every time he broke the world record. To beat the system, Bubka frequently broke his own record by the smallest possible margin, instead of going for his best jump. He got more money; the crowd got worse sport. The chapter ‘Why is your boss overpaid’ is in itself worth the price… Read more »
Having worked in the City for a number of years, I can tell you that the time spent at bonus time discussing your colleagues failures is usually a3-5 times the amount of time spent discussing your own successes.
This is contrast theory. Much easier to convince someone of the value of something where there is something to strongly contrast it against.