Shalmanese comments on The Two-Party Swindle - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 01 January 2008 08:38AM

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Comment author: Shalmanese 01 January 2008 01:34:38PM 3 points [-]

I object to your assertion that football players are paid disproportionate salaries relative to other fields. What does the average football player make? It's tricky to answer because it depends on who you regard as a football player. If you include everyone in the minor leagues, everyone playing college football, every high school quarterback who seriously considered a footballing career, then the average is quite low because the majority of "football players" make $0.

The reason why top footballers are paid enormous sums of money is because lots of people want to play football and the incentive structure is heavily skewed towards lavishly rewarding a small group of people. There are other fields with similar characteristics like writing. Restricting our sample to just the NFL is like arguing that authors are overpaid based on the average salaries of those on the NYT best sellers list.

Drug dealing is another good example, individual drug kingpins rake in far more than the highest paid football player could even imagine but the average pusher on the street is earning less than they would working minimum wage at McDonalds ("An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances." Steven D. Levitt and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2000, 115(3), pp. 755-89. http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&an=3474881).