Category: Sports
Those old (new?) service sector jobs
An ability to mimic the shrieks of langur monkeys may not seem like a bankable skill, but for some Indians it has become a job, if not a calling.
These vocal professionals specialise in pest control and are being employed to keep out unwanted primates as Delhi prepares to host the badminton world championships.
The sound of the langur is the only effective deterrent to the smaller rhesus macaques that roam around Delhi in large numbers, stealing food and causing havoc.
Here is more from the Times of London.
The Decision, the sequel
Imagine your career were coming to a close, how would you want it to end? By earning an especially large sum of money? Publishing a final wonderful paper? With an amazing act of mentorship?
When it comes to Lebron, had he wanted to finish his career with the guys he enjoys playing with the most, he would have opted for Golden State (Steph and Draymond).
If he had wanted to choose his favored organization, he would have signed with Miami.
Furthering the NBA prospects of his son Bronny, and having more time with family, would have meant staying in Los Angeles.
The hometown, sentimental choice would have been Cleveland.
As it turned out, he wanted to maximize his chances of winning a title, and with a team that did not just win a title (which rules out OKC, NYC). That meant signing with Philadelphia. Which is what he did.
What will your final major career decision look like?
My excellent Conversation with Chase Koch
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father’s lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa’s grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De’Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents’ garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it’s like working with MrBeast, how Koch Industries has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the “farm team,” why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old’s urging, where he’s traveling next, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: N.W.A., are they good? I like them.
KOCH: I had my phases. My first business, Tyler, was when I was 15 years old and one of my best friends to this day, Askia Ahmad, he was wiring up car stereos and building custom boom boxes and all that. We basically built a business out of my parents’ garage because they had all the tools and materials and everything. Like, “Let’s build a business out of here. My parents hopefully will pay for the machinery, and then we can sell these boom boxes to our friends at high prices and capture a big margin.” Through that, I learned about the whole gangster rap. Your listeners may be surprised, but it started with me, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Eazy-E, of course—
COWEN: It’s so good.
KOCH: Dre.
COWEN: Snoop.
KOCH: Snoop.
COWEN: You know Snoop, right?
KOCH: It’s so good, so good. Yes.
COWEN: What’s Snoop like?
KOCH: Snoop? Okay. This goes back to what I was mentioning on the power of music to unify people. So I’ve been with Stand Together. For the listeners that don’t know, it’ll give context to your question. Stand Together is an organization that has really a community of like-minded leaders that all believe in one thing, in the power of human potential, and that every human has a gift.
We all know that there’s so many barriers in society that are holding people back, whether it’s barriers in education, barriers in regulation, so you can’t start a business, barriers in our criminal justice system, you name it. What Stand Together does is we have basically a comprehensive strategy that addresses everything from education to policy to bottom-up empowerment in communities to drive real social change. I’ve been a part of this for as long as I can remember.
My father’s been working on social change for 60 years. My passion for music, as you can see from your last line of questioning, with Stand Together and that whole community, we never tapped into culture. When I say culture and what the next generation pays attention to—sports, music, YouTube, entertainment, creators, media. During COVID, I had this idea that we’ve never tapped into music to drive social change.
And on one specific point:
Back to your question on energy, 4 percent of the overall capital consumed at Koch is in refining, which is basically where my grandfather started the company. I think that surprises a lot of people because I think a lot of people are still stuck in this, “Well, you’re this energy company.” No, we’re not. We touch the majority of the economy now, and we’re in everything from forest products, consumer products, software, as I described, glass manufacturing, to energy and fertilizers as well.
Interesting throughout.
Incentives matter, installment #1637
I had long wondered about this:
Performance metrics can misalign individual and organizational incentives. We study a clean case: an NBA player holding the ball as a quarter expires must choose between a low-probability “heave” that can only help his team and protecting his shooting statistics. We model this decision as a metric-driven principal-agent problem and test it using play-by-play data from 2015-16 through 2025-26, exploiting the 2025-26 Heave Rule, which removed the individual statistical penalty for end-of-quarter heaves. Before the reform, players heaved on 58 percent of opportunities; reluctance was concentrated among efficient shooters and players in contract years, as the model predicts. After the reform, the heave rate jumped to 94 percent, the efficiency gradient collapsed, and difference-indifferences estimates using the untreated fourth quarter confirm the effect is sharp, immediate, and smallest among the players with the least efficiency to protect. Removing a metric distortion realigned individual behavior with team objectives almost completely.
That is from a recent paper by James W. Kemper and Noah Liptack,titled “Overcoming Misaligned Incentives: Evidence from the NBA Heave Rule.” Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
That was then, this is now
One of the cool things about European football is that it provides good evidence that high-income, high-ability individuals move in response to tax rates…
That is from Jeremy Horpendahl, citing research by…Emanuel Saez.
What should I ask Michael Moritz?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him, based around his new book Ausländer: One Family’s Story of Escape and Exile. Mike of course was a pioneering venture capitalist through Sequoia, and before that had a distinguished career as a journalist, which included books on Chrysler, Apple (the first such book I believe?), and soccer coach Alex Ferguson of Manchester United. Here is his Wikipedia page.
So what should I ask him?
Cricket and the railways
Railways are a golden thread in the history of cricket, making national competition possible in every current Test-playing nation (with the exceptino of the West Indies and Afghanistan). In later years, we will see railway workers as exporters of cricket to Scotland and Wales and beyond to Britain’s formal and informal commercial empires. We will see enduring railway-based teams, including in Pakistan the winners of cricket’s most comprehensive first-class victory.
That is from Richard Heller and Peter Oborne, Full Circle: A History of Cricket. And I had not realized this: “As recently as 1945, 98 percent of Australians had their family origins in Great Britain or Ireland.”
Dean Karlan has a Substack
He starts his new essay with this:
In 2014 I wrote in The New York Times that if your own team is not in the World Cup, you should root for the one whose victory would do the most good. Add up the happiness a title would create, more where more people care, more where incomes are lower, and more where a win would be a first rather than a habit, and root for the country on top. That year it was Nigeria. With 48 teams in 2026, and more of the world’s poorer and first-time sides in the field, I rebuilt the guide, with more nuance and, thanks to AI, at a fraction of the old cost. It updates itself as the games are played.
At least for now, you should root for the DRC he argues.
Safety and nation-building in Mexico
That is the topic of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Consider the special nature of Mexican politics. First and foremost, Mexico is still not a mature nation-state. By one estimate, drug gangs may control as much as one-third of its territory. That might sound bizarre, but from the standpoint of Mexican history, it is not new or unusual.
Start with the 19th century. When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, what we now call Central America joined the new country only briefly and then split off, even though that land was under the same Spanish jurisdiction. Those cultures and economies were not sufficiently unified to come along.
After independence, the state of Yucatán rebelled repeatedly, almost claiming its independence. In the 1840s, the U.S. declared war on Mexico and took away about half of its territory. Texas already had seceded to become an independent republic. In 1857, Mexico fought a civil war. The French invaded in 1861, and by 1864 they helped install a Habsburg, Maximilian, as emperor. Yet Maximilian never came close to controlling the entire country, and was quickly deposed and executed. The 1910 Mexican Revolution killed about 10 percent of the population by some estimates.
The rest of the 20th century was more peaceful, but much of Mexico never fell under unitary rule as did the U.S. and Western Europe. The more remote areas were mostly on their own, and they regarded the government as a potential oppressor rather than a savior. So when the drug trade heated up in Mexico in the 1990s as Colombian traffickers were partially thwarted, drug gangs were able to operate in many parts of Mexico with impunity. Eventually, they became the de facto rulers of those territories, supplying public goods such as general protection in addition to running their illegal businesses. All for a high price, of course, as extortion is still the ruling principle in those parts of the country. If you buy avocados from Mexico, for instance, there is a good chance that part of your money is going to pay tribute to drug gangs.
Another significant fact about Mexico is the size and power of its central government. It spends just short of 23 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), relatively low for a country of its level of development. By contrast, Brazil, which has roughly comparable living standards, has a central government that spends over 32 percent of that country’s GDP. If the Brazilian government is too large, Mexico’s is too weak and too small, most of all because Mexico cannot beat back its drug gangs by brute force or preempt them in the first place.
Mexico as a topic will never become obsolete, not for the United States at least.
A market-based solution to NBA draft tanking?
Zach Lowe shares a tanking solution idea that came up in the GMs meeting that intrigued a few General Managers:
A proposal to not get rid of the draft entirely, but get rid of the draft order. Every team gets 100 draft credits let’s say. You bid your draft credits on every individual slot in the draft. You can also trade your draft credits like a veteran player for 40 draft credits if you want to go in a rebuilding direction. As teams advance in the playoffs, they lose draft credits so the best teams would have less to bid on individual picks. So you can take all your credits and bid on the number 1 pick in the draft if you want. Or if you think next years draft is better, you roll your credits over.
Can that work? Here is the tweet.
My email on NBA anti-tanking rules
I fear that bad management is a recurring problem with those teams. So perhaps no system of incentives can fix that.
I am not sure that bidding and superstar teams are so unpopular with the fans, especially as the NBA has become more international. Maybe ten superstars sell the league in any case, and you want them to be on very good teams.
…The incentives system also has to be palatable and explicable to the very casual fan, which I think rules out some of the more complex options. If the fans are asking “is my team trying to win or to lose now?” the system is maybe already broken.
Claudia Goldin and the WNBA
After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics in 2023, she received hundreds of invitations and requests. She accepted just three.
One of them was advising the WNBA players union as the women prepared to negotiate a new labor deal with the league.
When Goldin replied via email to Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the players union, “I remember just reading it and screaming,” Jackson said. Goldin had one requirement: She refused to be paid.
This month, the two sides reached a collective bargaining agreement that gave Women’s National Basketball Association players a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.
It isn’t just the biggest pay increase in U.S. league history. It is, as far as Goldin is aware, the biggest increase any union anywhere has ever negotiated.
“It’s astounding,” the 79-year-old Harvard economist said.
Mike Bass, a spokesman who represents both the National Basketball Association and the WNBA, called the deal “transformational.”
…More recently, as the pay negotiations stretched on, Goldin said she stayed focused not on the countless separate points in the typical lengthy labor deal but on one central equation: the fraction of league revenue going to players’ salary and benefits.
Goldin’s calculations had a calming effect on the players, said Jackson, the union’s executive director.
Here is more from the WSJ. Via Anecdotal.
University of Chicago fact of the day
A team largely composed of economics majors who know their way around Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, Chicago (23-4) is a DIII powerhouse currently in the DIII Sweet 16 and chasing its first-ever NCAA national title.
“Nobody’s ever going to confuse this with Alabama football,” says head coach Mike McGrath, “but if you think about the student-athlete model, I think we show you can do both of those things very, very well.”
…“Obviously, the kids are really smart,” he says. “You can’t B.S. them. They’re going to challenge everything that you tell them, you have to be prepared for that…there’s a need to understand the why behind things.”
…a friend of the program, Chicago professor John List, is working with students on an analysis of player positioning.
Here is more from the WSJ, via Rama Rao.
The economics of the NBA trading deadline (from my email)
From an anonymous correspondent:
Perhaps, as NBA fan, there’s a column to be written about the incentives that drove the NBA trade market: namely the all-out search to avoid/get out of the luxury tax and the looming “tank” battle among the 6 worst teams. These are both direct results of the recent NBA collective bargaining agreement changes. Of course, as these attempts to regulate behavior go, the ‘benign’ intentions of the regulators are far different from the actions of the rational actors having to live within the system.
The funniest behavior-following-incentive example was orchestrated by the Minnesota Timberwolves. In step-by-step:
–They traded Mike Conley Jr. + a 1st round pick to the Bulls for “cash”.
–Why would they do this? For two reasons: one above board, one below board.
–Above board: the trade freed up cap room to trade for another Bulls guard, in a separate trade (Ayo Dosunmo). They could not have done that trade, according to cap rules, with Conley on board.
Now the below board, cap and rule circumvention steps:
–The Bulls then re-traded Conley to the Hornets as a ‘throw-in’ portion of a larger trade.
–The Hornets then waived Conley
–Why these moves? Because now Minnesota can re-sign Conley after he was waived. They would not have been allowed to re-sign him if the Bulls cut him. (You can’t re-sign a player you traded…unless that player is re-traded).
There will, of course, be no evidence that Minnesota set this whole process up during the step 1 portion. But, human intuition would say: of course this was all part of Minnesota’s original plan.
And then economically: I challenge any business, anywhere, to have executed a better cost-savings strategy than the Boston Celtics did this year. They left last off-season with a looming $540mm salary + luxury tax bill for this 2025-26 season. Through a series of trades, they have cut that down to $190mm – and have fully avoided the luxury tax. Most amazingly: they are a better team today than they were at end of last year. That is $350mm in savings in one year, with a quality improvement to boot! Unheard of efficiency.
Sadly: the worst part of the NBA overregulation world will now commence. 6-8 teams will spend the rest of the year trying to lose every game. Losing profits in this world, through the ‘logic’ of the NBA draft lottery.
At any rate, a fun day for any NBA fan – but especially for the economically-minded. Incentives matter!
TC again: I would not have expected the major trade stories to involve the Washington Wizards…
Who is good at soccer?
This study explores the psychological profiles of elite soccer players, revealing that success on the field goes beyond physical ability. By analyzing a sample of 328 participants, including 204 elite soccer players from the top teams in Brazil and Sweden, we found that elite players have exceptional cognitive abilities, including improved planning, memory, and decision-making skills. They also possess personality traits like high conscientiousness and openness to experience, along with reduced neuroticism. Using AI, we identified unique psychological patterns that could help in talent identification and development. These insights can be used to better understand the mental attributes that contribute to success in soccer and other high-performance fields.
That is from a new paper by Leonardo Bonetti, et.al., via Yureed Elahi.