Category: Sports

INTJ – The Scientists

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it – often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

Analysis
This show what parts of the brain that were dominant during writing.

The analyzer is here.

Singh and Patel came to the United States six months ago after being the top finishers in an Indian reality TV show called the "Million Dollar Arm" that drew about 30,000 contestants. The show sought to find athletes who could throw strikes at 85 miles per hour or faster….The contest was sponsored by a California sports management company that believed it could locate major league-worthy arms in a country of more than 1 billion…

They were just signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates.  Here is more and thanks to Michael Tofias for the pointer.  Here is the web site for the show.  Here is information on the initial announcement of the prize contest.

When one team wins, another loses.  If the Celtics win the championship, the Lakers cannot.  Sports at the team level, within the context of a single season, is more or less a zero-sum game.  But ranking the quality and fame of players is more multi-dimensional and thus it is more positive-sum.  Maybe the advent of LeBron James diminishes the luster of Tim Duncan (or maybe it doesn’t), but the total amount of fame produced still goes up because of LeBron and his efforts.

Players who maximize team wins are investing more resources into the zero-sum game.  (In fact team players in small markets with few fans are especially destructive of human welfare and it is those players who should be most encouraged to become ball hogs.)  Players who pursue individual glory — even if at the expense of the team — are investing more resources into the positive-sum game and thus they are doing more to benefit society.

So why is it again that we glorify the team players?

Are you picking Philly to make the Eastern finals?  Think again:

In a league in which you need a proven crunch-time guy to battle the
other proven crunch-time guys in the last three minutes of close games,
they don’t have a proven crunch-time guy. (And don’t tell me it’s
[Elton] Brand. I watched him for four years on the Clippers; he’s not that type
of player.) Fundamentally, this can’t work for anything beyond 45-47
wins and maybe a second-round appearance … and that’s before you factor
in the skewed level of expectations already in place, or the fact that,
again, they just spent $83 million to reunite the best two guys on a
27-win Clippers team from 2003. I just don’t see it.

I’m picking the Wizards to tank and making no other predictions.  The interesting question is whether Cleveland will deal for Allen Iverson.  Here is much more.  You’ll also find this excellent sentence:

Jamaal Tinsley is a sunk cost.

The fallacies of Cowen and Krugman are of the most basic sort — errors
only made possible by men captured by a deeply false conception of
"science", and hence a pseudo-scientific capital-free, causally impossible, aggregate "modeling" approach to the macroeconomy, rather than a causally real relative price / heterogeneous capital ordering process approach, just as Hayek explained in his Nobel Prize lecture.

Here is the full article.  I thank Bryan Caplan for the pointer. 

Addendum: Angus comments.

Kiwi song videos about chess boxing.  The interviews produce several remarks of interest plus some nice accents.

Over the last year a few of you sent me links about chess boxing.  I thank you all but I rejected your mainstream taste to hold out for something quirky.

Under the alternative Republican plan, the government would set up an
expanded insurance system, financed by the banks, that would rescue
individual home mortgages. The government would not have to buy up the
toxic mortgage-backed assets that are weighing down financial
institutions.

Here is the story.  Is this the Jeffrey Ely plan (you heard it here first!)?  Do any of you have more information?  Does the Paulson-Bernanke rejection of this plan count as a very bad signal about the immediate solvency of major banks?

Was September 2008 the month of greatest increase in United States Wealth in History?

Doesn’t the long term economic impact of 5-10 trillion dollars of offshore oil overwhelm the trillion dollars from the bailout?

That’s from Andrew, a loyal MR reader.  He sends along this link.  I have not myself done any calculations of the fiscal benefits from such oil (which are distinct from the price effect, which is likely small).  Does anyone know a number?

At first I thought he was going to mention the recent decline in the price of oil, which on average you can expect to be permanent.  The real lesson, I would say, is how much coordination (or lack thereof) matters and how badly representative agent models perform in explaining the most important economic changes.

The consistently interesting Drake Bennett writes:

…a few scholars have started to suggest that there may indeed be another
kind of benefit from big-time sports. There’s a catch, though: the team
has to be good. In a forthcoming paper, economist Michael Davis and the
psychologist Christian End say that having a winning NFL football team
increases the incomes of the people who live and work in its hometown
by as much as $120 a year. And while the study doesn’t identify exactly
what causes the boost, the authors point to psychological literature
suggesting that winning fans are at once harder workers and bigger
spenders. In short, buoyed by the team’s success, we work longer hours,
take bigger risks, and shop more avidly, all of which helps the local
economy.

I have a simple hypothesis.  Winning sports team cause local fans to feel better and thus to spend more money.  Most importantly, consumption tends to be local and thus the spending shows up in the city of the winning sports team.  Saved funds, in contrast, are invested but banks and securitization make these funds mobile.  Savings will help the national or international economy but not the local economy so much.

Since more savings would be desirable, the best outcome is if no team wins, if a small city team wins, or if the victory is uninspiring.  Detroit vs. San Antonio, anybody?  That’s what the American economy needs.

Alternatively, you might think that the economic boost comes from greater confidence, higher labor supply, and other supply-side effects.  Then you should root for the teams from the largest cities (Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia) and most of all you should root against the Washington Wizards.

Or so it seems (original source here):

• “Professional athletes and executives have given $445,334 to the
  two nominees – 55.8 percent to McCain and 44.2 percent to Obama,
  according to ESPN analysis of figures from the Center for Responsive
  Politics, a nonpartisan research group.”
• “The difference this election is that pro sports donors are more
  divided. In the past two presidential elections, the Democratic nominee
  has struggled to muster at most 16 percent of pro sports donations.”…
• “McCain has lots of friends in the dugout, but his biggest fans are
  in football. Six of McCain’s top 10 pro sports donors are with NFL
  teams, led by the San Diego Chargers, Dallas Cowboys and Houston
  Texans.”
• “NBA staff topped Obama’s list of pro sports donors at $24,360.”

I can think of a few hypotheses to explain these results:

1. Sports figures don’t want high marginal tax rates for the upper income brackets.

2. Currently the disproportionate representation of African-Americans in sports is throwing more support to Obama than a Democratic candidate normally would receive.

3. Perhaps athletes are less likely to come from coastal elites, who are becoming increasingly Democratic.

4. Republicans have historically shown less interest in regulating professional sports than have Democrats.

5. The sport of football most embodies the ethic of martial virtue and so football players and executives are especially drawn to McCain.

Is there more?

It is here and it was produced yesterday afternoon.  The point about fertility was borrowed from Steve Sailer.

From an interview with Vladimir Kramnik.  Note that Kramnik is playing in a regular chess tournament, shortly before with world championship match with Anand:

Is it difficult for you, because of course you cannot show your preparations, your openings for the match, so you have to choose, let us say, not your real openings…

Yes, sometimes. But it is nor really about this, it is about that fact that sometimes it would be too simple if you don’t show anything. That also gives a lot of information to your opponent. Then he knows that what you played you will for sure not play in the match. That is why you need to mix. Some things. I have to show, some things I don’t show. So I am trying to confuse as much as possible my opponent. And this is a bit difficult. Before each game I start to think if he plays this should I play this or should I play that, or even during the game I start to think maybe I should play this or maybe I shouldn’t play it. It is a little bit confusing I would say. It is easier to play when you don’t have such an event in front of you.

Kramnik has been playing indifferently lately, yet when times demand he can be the world’s strongest match player.  Anand is the current world champion, noting that he won the title through a tournament structure.  Match chess is all about adjustments and stamina and defense and preparation and strength of will.  Winning tournaments requires that you beat the weaker players consistently and that has never been Kramnik’s strength.

Anand, by the way, can play speed chess almost as well as he plays classical slow chess.  He is an amazing tactician and a brilliant defender.  But does he have a deep enough strategic style to prevail in a longer and tougher setting?  I’ll let you know how the match goes.

High school cheerleading accounted for 65.1 percent of all catastrophic
sports injuries among high school females over the past 25 years.

Here is the link, with a photo.  Loyal MR readers will know that I am a strong and genuine non-paternalist.  But if you are a paternalist, and you are looking for one place to start, well…it’s not just the injuries that should point your attention in this direction.  We have to raise tax revenue from somewhere, right?  Currently we are subsidizing cheerleading and, along the lines of Robert Frank’s column, that makes no more sense than subsidizing fuel.