Category: Sports
The idea of wealth taxes is only getting started
Two top advisers to German Chancellor Angela Merkel have called for a tax on private wealth and property in eurozone debtor states to force the rich to fund rescue costs, marking a radical new departure for EMU crisis strategy.
Here is more. I tell you again, this will be a major issue for the next twenty years and not just in the eurozone. Take a look at all those state and local U.S. pension funds expecting seven percent rates of return.
Notice of the article is from @LindaYueh.
How do you build immunity from choking? (a meditation on Carlsen and Kramnik)
Yesterday Magnus Carlsen and Vladimir Kramnik each played decisive chess games in the Candidates’ tournament, for the right to challenge Vishy Anand for the world championship title. Carlsen held the tiebreaker, so he had only to match Kramnik’s result — draw or win — to proceed to the match with Anand.
Both lost. Uncharacteristically, both fell into time trouble. Both made bad mistakes even after time trouble was over. The chess world was shocked.
Arguably both choked.
Yet Kramnik has won several world championship matches, including against Kasparov, and Carlsen rose to world #1 at a very young age of course.
How does one become immune to choking?
If you have mastered stages 1 through n, presumably you still can choke at stage n + 1. Carlsen had never played in a world championship or candidates’ match before. In 1997 Kasparov choked when he had to play an improved Deep Blue, a machine.
Is there mean-reversion in choking and immunity to choking? If you play at a supremely confident level at the very top, nine times in a row, do you forget how to handle pressure and eventually revert to choking? Immunity against choking can wear off, or holding a title and having to defend it can raise the fear of choking through a kind of endowment effect (Bobby Fischer).
Does a string of confident winning raise the stakes more rapidly than you can master a rising choke, thus bringing you to n + 27 too quickly? (The Miami Heat just lost a 27-game winning streak.) Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak has proven so hard to break, as there is always a new and tougher choking margin.
Or can one ascend to n + 3 with sufficiently strong margins of error that perhaps the fear of choking is never overcome and remains in the background for when tougher situations come along? Or one can ascend to n + 3 if everyone chokes along the way; someone must be choking least but still you are always a choker.
Under one theory, you become immune to choking at stage n + 2 only by at least once choking at stage n + 2 and then, on another occasion, overcoming your choke. I call this the LeBron James theory. Can it be that such loss/win experiences are required periodically and not just once up front?
The lessons are that it can be difficult to overcome choking, and that a complex mix of losing and winning may help you more with choking than simply lots of winning.
Self-punishment and incentives
[LeBron] James told me that when he was working on his 3s, he’d punish himself until he met a lofty set of self-enforced shooting milestones.
“It’s work,” James says. “It’s a lot of work. It’s being in workouts, and not accomplishing your goal, and paying for it. So, if I get to a spot in a workout and want to make eight out of 10, if I don’t make eight of 10, then I run. I push myself to the point of exhaustion until I make that goal. So you build up that mentality that you got to make that shot and then use that in a game situation — it’s the ultimate feeling, when you’re able to work on something and implement it.”
Here is more, all of it focused on how LeBron James improved his game.
What is required of a successful human cannonball?
While Hentoff-Killian is not opposed to taking longer flights in the future, once she gets more comfortable with the cannon, she’s not sure if she’ll ever want to fly while in flames. “You have to hold your breath when you’re on fire,” she says, “and I like to breathe.”
And this:
The Human Cannonball doesn’t usually remember much about each flight, aside from a quick impression of soaring through the air. On the other hand, she has just been shot out of a 24-foot-long air-compression cannon and travels between 75 and 100 feet at a force of 7 g. That’s greater force than a roller coaster, greater than a Formula One racecar, greater than the space shuttle. A force powerful enough to have caused some human cannonballs to pass out midflight. This has never happened to Elliana Grace in more than 100 shots since she took the job last October. Still, she’s in the air approximately three seconds. How much would you remember?
Here is much more, very interesting throughout. Some human cannonballs keep the job for as many as seventeen years. By the way, Hentoff-Killian, the featured individual in the story, is the granddaughter of Nat Hentoff.
Hat tip goes to @RobertCottrell.
Why a coach should be ambiguous
Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight? Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.
If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.
An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.
Hobby drone golf markets in everything
“The Rocketry Golf Organization (RGO) Aimed its First Contest with Golf Pro, Shawn Kelly, vs. Doug Frost, at The Ridge Golf Course, Auburn, Ca., March 19 and 26, 2013
Rockets with plastic golf balls, replace driver clubs, as they fly to the green no matter how far. Shawn Kelly, golf pro, will compete against these rocket machines. Doug Frost, rocketry golfer, will have to putt out with a real golf ball and club.” -PRNewswire
For the pointer I thank the apparently excellent Brett Keller.
*Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing*
The authors are Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman and the Amazon link is here. If you’re like me, by this point you have “popular behavioral economics book” fatigue. Still, I bought and read this one through. It doesn’t fall into the “designed to erase all doubts” category, but still it has some interesting ideas which you won’t find in the other popular behavioral economics books. I am glad I bought and read it. Here is one bit:
…Fehr also noticed a difference between children who’s grown up as siblings and those who were only children. Contrary to the presumption that only children are more selfish than children raised in larger families, Fehr found the onlies to be the more cooperative and selfless. They were completely untroubled by handing over toys to another child, whereas the siblings flatly refused. Fehr came to the conclusion that the onlies didn’t know to be competitive because they’d never had to compete…They weren’t afraid of sharing toys, because they didn’t understand if you gave Barbie to another child, she might come back missing her leg or head.
It is claimed that, between the ages of three and seven, siblings clash 3.5 times per hour, on average (unless you are in the Caplan household).
Here is another interesting section:
…one study of every single pitch thrown during the 2005/2006 Major League Baseball season — some 1, 374,923 pitches — showed that most MLB pitchers are secretly prevention-focused. As they get closer to finishing out innings, their pitch locations become more conservative. A similar study of over 2 million PGA tour putts showed that pro golfers tend to leave it short as the stakes and pressure rise.
The best at what they do
When you look at a competition where one of the inputs of the production function is an exogenously distributed characteristic, players with a high endowment on that dimension have a head start. This has two effects on the distribution of the (partially) acquired characteristics that enter the production function. First, there is the pure statistical effect I alluded to above. If success requires some minimum height then the pool of competitors excludes a large component of the population.
There is a second effect on endogenous acquisition of skills. Competition is less intense and they have less incentive to acquire skills in order to be competitive. So even current NBA players are less talented than they would be if competition was less exclusive. So what are the sports whose athletes are the best at what they do?
My ranking
1. Table Tennis
2. Soccer
3. Tennis
4. Golf
5. Chess
How would such a ranking look for the social sciences? Among a broader list of activities, where would blogging fall on the scale?
Does Cable TV Ripoff People Who Don’t Like Sports?
Recently the LATimes ignited a firestorm of anti-sports commentary by arguing that people who don’t watch sports are being ripped off by Cable TV.
A key concern is that the higher bills driven by sports are being shouldered by subscribers whether they watch sports or not.
…”I pay $98 a month for cable and half of that is for sports?” said Vincent Castellanos, 51, a fashion stylist who lives inLos Feliz. “I’ve never once gone to a single sports channel. I wasn’t even aware I was paying for it. I want my money back. Who do I call?”
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic corrected some of the numbers but agreed with the analysis:
If you watch sports, millions of pay-TV households who never click on their ESPN channels are subsidizing your habit. If you don’t watch sports, you’re one of the suckers paying an extra $100 a year for a product you don’t consume.
Kevin Drum demanded a la carte pricing so that:
“sports fans would be forced to pay the actual cost of their sports programming without being subsidized by the rest of us.”
I don’t watch sports very often but I think the commentators have misunderstood the economics of Cable TV and the math of content provision. Let’s consider a simple model, there are content providers such as ESPN and Bravo, distributors such as the cable company and consumers. Let’s assume that there are 4 consumers, 3 of them value football at $10 and Top Chef at $0 and one vice-versa so the model looks like this:
How much will ESPN and Bravo charge the distributors? Bilateral bargaining between content sellers and distributors can be complex but for the point I want to make we can assume that the distributors simple pass on their input costs to consumers. In this case, ESPN will charge the distributor $30 and Bravo will charge $10, the maximum that they can get.
Here is where the LA Times and the others go very wrong – they reason that $30 of the $40 charged is due to sports so each person is paying $7.50 for football ($7.50*4=$30) and $2.50 for Top Chef ($2.50*4=$10) and, therefore, the Top Chef viewer is being ripped off because 3/4 of their bill is going to support programming they never watch! Mathematically this is as true as any other division of total cost but conceptually it makes little sense. Consider, for example, what happens if we add football viewers. With 9 football viewers, ESPN will charge $90 and Bravo $10 and thus the LA Times would conclude that the Top Chef viewer is even more ripped off than before–90% of their bill is going to football! It’s very odd, however, that the ripoff of the Top Chef viewer gets bigger even as the price that they are charged and their viewing habits aren’t changing! Also as we add more football viewers the per-subscriber charge for Bravo gets smaller and smaller, with 10 viewers it’s only $1. Implicitly the LA Times is suggesting that this number represents what a la carte price would be or could be but that’s nonsense–whatever Bravo’s a la carte price would be it doesn’t get lower as we add more football viewers.
Conceptually it’s much clearer to say that each person is being charged $10 for the programming that they most want to watch. Moreover, the reason that Cable TV firms bundle is precisely because by making the demand for their product more homogeneous they can increase profits. In other words, the best bundle for the Cable TV firm is one in which everyone does in fact value the bundle equally.
The bottom line is that there is no reason to think that Top Chef viewers are subsidizing football.
The Washington Wizards are the deflationary sector
“It’s very driven by who the visiting team is,” he said. “For example, tonight, you can get into the [Wizards/Blazers] game for $1.69, but to get into the Heat game on Dec. 4 is $26, so it’s definitely matchup driven. When you have teams that are poor — and I am certain that the Wizards qualify — you see the bottom drop out.”
Yet, while the Wizards’ thrifty prices may not be uncommon, how fast they became so thrifty is.
“What’s rarer about this instance that it’s happening 12 games into the season,” Lehrman said. “Normally, you see this level of apathy take place in the middle of the season when you’re 40 games in and there’s not gonna be a playoff chase. You don’t normally see the fans quit on their team so quickly.
The story is here, and the Wizards were 0-12 to start the year. Here is further information about their quality.
They won their first game last night, which perhaps will bring the expectation of higher prices and thus stimulate demand.
Why do older players commit more technical fouls in basketball? (model this)
Surprisingly, the average player gets whistled for more technicals each season they are in the league, according to Stats LLC. For instance, rookies average less than one technical. That number grows to an average of two technical fouls by the third year of a player’s career, and to more than three technicals by the fifth. Players average closer to four technicals per season upon reaching their 12th year.
Why the additional whistles? A primary reason: Players get ruder as they get older.
“Guys will call you ‘Mister’ early in their career, then they develop a comfort level to where it becomes a first-name basis,” said retired official Steve Javie, now an ESPN analyst. “They’re more comfortable talking to you, and sometimes that leads them to express their emotions a bit too much at times.”
The technical-foul disparity is most pronounced for players who enter the league as high draft picks.
Here is more. What are the other implied predictions of this model? And this is interesting too:
While players get more technicals the longer they stay in the league, coaches do the opposite. The average NBA coach picks up six technicals a season his first six years on the job before mellowing out. Those who coach 13 years or more average fewer than four techincals per season.
What is the world’s most valuable media property?
Arguably it is ESPN, which is now valued at about $40 billion:
The reality is that there is not another media property in the world worth as much as ESPN because no media asset delivering content generates close to as much money. Wunderlich pegs the value of the Disney Channel, which is one of the most valuable channels and has the third highest affiliate fees, at $10 billion. It is even uglier in print. The current market value of the New York Times is $1.3 billion. The only media companies in the world worth more than $40 billion are News Corp. ($58 billion) and Comcast ($96 billion). The value of News Corp. is spread out among dozens of media assets, while Comcast derives most of its value from being a cable provider.
What are these people really up to?
No wonder they don’t have a clear sense of what “austerity” means:
Mrs Brooks told the Leveson Inquiry earlier this year that Mr Cameron signed some of his missives to her “LOL” – mistakenly thinking it meant “lots of love” rather than “laugh Out loud”.
Here is more. The article is puzzling throughout.
The EconLog team winning strategy
Pretend Arnold Kling has departed, get under the salary cap, take on Garett Jones and Luigi Zingales (sixth man), keep Bryan and David in the starting line-up, and then get Arnold back again. Here is Arnold’s very important post on NYC recovery. I don’t myself have any particular prediction, but I will say this is a real test of how well this country can these days do infrastructure.
Will Ohio State’s football team decide who wins the White House?
Here is my recent Slate.com piece with Kevin Grier, excerpt:
Just how irrational are voters? It is statistically possible that the outcome of a handful of college football games in the right battleground states could determine the race for the White House.
Economists Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Mo make this argument in a fascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They examined whether the outcomes of college football games on the eve of elections for presidents, senators, and governors affected the choices voters made. They found that a win by the local team, in the week before an election, raises the vote going to the incumbent by around 1.5 percentage points. When it comes to the 20 highest attendance teams—big athletic programs like the University of Michigan, Oklahoma, and Southern Cal—a victory on the eve of an election pushes the vote for the incumbent up by 3 percentage points. That’s a lot of votes, certainly more than the margin of victory in a tight race. And these results aren’t based on just a handful of games or political seasons; the data were taken from 62 big-time college teams from 1964 to 2008.
The good news, we suppose, is that sports really can cheer us up and make the world seem like a brighter place. The sports fan is left happier and more satisfied all around, not just on the gridiron. When you are feeling upbeat and happy, you feel more satisfied with the status quo in general. And feeling satisfied with the status quo makes you more likely to vote for the incumbent politician, even if that’s totally irrational.
The study’s authors control for economic, demographic, and political factors, so the results are much more sophisticated than just a raw correlation. They also did a deeper analysis that took into account people’s expectations. It turns out that surprise wins are especially potent, raising local support for incumbent politicians by around 2.5 percentage points.