[Grief]

Azath Vitr (D, on 08 July 2019 - 05:51 PM, said:

Tax the whole professional sports enterprise, or at least the most exorbitantly and unnecessarily overpriced aspects of it (with tax incentives for making meaningful improvements). Taxes (or charities) should effectively be returning that value to the people. It then becomes a selective tax on people who spend money on professional sports. (Amateur, participatory sports are a social good, promoting exercise, teamwork, sociability, etc. (though exercise is counterbalanced by injuries, sociability by aggression and hostility, etc.); but highly exclusionary and absurdly expensive pro sports tickets are not a social good. Pro sports encourage people to sit around watching other people play sports instead of exercising; and while they may reinforce community bonds, they do so by encouraging hostility towards other communities.)

Sure, you could selectively tax people for spending on that particular hobby. Though personally I would tend towards simply taxing the higher-wealth brackets far more. Professional athletes are far from the least deserving of their wealthy peers.

Azath Vitr (D, on 08 July 2019 - 05:51 PM, said:

Technology has made this much easier. (While it also makes hacking or sophisticated schemes a possibility, they're almost certainly only minor issues that wouldn't affect most of the volume.) In a lottery system, a simple option would be to require the name on the ticket to match the name on government-issued ID or a passport (could that get conservatives on board? realistically though, none of this will happen in the United States in the near future).

It has. Then you get into a debate over what the "correct" value of a ticket should be since it's not being set by a market but rather by a central authority. In the event where this money is taken from the athletes, you're essentially removing wages from the worker to give to the consumer. Which feels somewhat debatable in terms of morality. Watching professional sports isn't particularly more productive than playing them, after all.

Azath Vitr (D, on 08 July 2019 - 05:51 PM, said:

The main advantages of capitalism---quickly and reliably matching supply to demand, providing motivation, etc.---will plausibly be superseded by ubiquitous real-time personal data collection, AI, the internet of things, and the administrative surveillance state. It's perhaps too bad that this will probably first be achieved in China, given their severe restrictions on intellectual freedom (among other things...).

If anything this makes the problem worse. Rather than superseding capitalism, the system you're describing is essentially hyper-capitalist. Algorithmic pricing discrimination works to more accurately gauge exactly what a consumer is willing to pay on the market (i.e, where on the demand curve they fall). What you're describing seems more like optimizing market-economics than superseding it, to me. It's a technological way to ensure that companies maximise their surplus while giving the minimum they can to the customer (i.e, selling at exactly the price point where consumers will buy, rather than customers being able to find bargains where the product costs less than they would pay).

Indeed, the potential for social harm and anti-competitive behaviour that is facilitated by algorithmic pricing has been a pretty hot topic in policy circles for the last few years (for one example see the OECD, Algorithms and Collusion: Competition Policy in the Digital Age).

worry, on 08 July 2019 - 05:53 PM, said:

Grief is right (until we abolish capitalism).

Oh hello new sig quote it's been a while.

[worry]

But there is no correlation between how hard you work and how much money you make under capitalism. There's only income generation via popularity contest -- which sure, occasionally lines up with necessity, exploiting it mercilessly -- and then intra-industry bargaining between labor and owner (usually through the middleman of management) as to how that income is spread around, which comes down to power dynamics. By all means, tax the industry and even personal incomes at much higher marginal rates. But let's not pretend athletes are the problem. There's a reason they make such an easy scapegoat -- especially in the US -- and it's an uglier reason than anyone here personally intends, I am sure (not sarcasm).

[Silencer]

To be clear, I include a reduction in wages for the corporate side of the teams in my previous post.

That could be achieved through a 100% tax above a certain income threshold, and I'm not inherently opposed to that, but I do think that comparatively the income of sportsball teams is skewed horrifically and not in a way that should be celebrated. Same as Hollywood.

Nor do I think lauding it as an outcome of economics makes sense, given the whole system has been set up to create artificial scarcity of tickets and therefore inflate the prices accordingly. It's at best a very successful con and at worst the natural outcome of most "X as a service" models that are becoming more popular in other industries. It would, after all, be very easy to restrict the number of times a Netflix documentary can be viewed and so start charging higher one off viewing prices- that isn't a success story, even if Netflix employees get paid more as a result. It's a manipulation of the market to exploit consumers. Much like most big sportsball events and leagues. It just happens to result in unreasonably compensated employees in this particular case.

[Grief]

Silencer, on 08 July 2019 - 10:58 PM, said:

To be clear, I include a reduction in wages for the corporate side of the teams in my previous post.

That could be achieved through a 100% tax above a certain income threshold, and I'm not inherently opposed to that, but I do think that comparatively the income of sportsball teams is skewed horrifically and not in a way that should be celebrated. Same as Hollywood.

Nor do I think lauding it as an outcome of economics makes sense, given the whole system has been set up to create artificial scarcity of tickets and therefore inflate the prices accordingly. It's at best a very successful con and at worst the natural outcome of most "X as a service" models that are becoming more popular in other industries. It would, after all, be very easy to restrict the number of times a Netflix documentary can be viewed and so start charging higher one off viewing prices- that isn't a success story, even if Netflix employees get paid more as a result. It's a manipulation of the market to exploit consumers. Much like most big sportsball events and leagues. It just happens to result in unreasonably compensated employees in this particular case.

Firstly, as far as I'm aware the money in football comes more from TV deals, merchandising, and sponsorships rather than from tickets. Guardian figures suggest this is certainly true for the premier league. Secondly, I'm curious as to why you think game tickets are "artificially" scarce. There are physical limits on the number of matches top athletes can play. There are physical limits on the number of seats the stadiums house. The fact that the industry is generally trying to push both of these numbers higher suggests that they see a stronger economic rationale for increasing the number of tickets where they can rather than keeping them scarce. The significant waiting lists for club season tickets similarly suggests that tickets are mostly likely underpriced in the short-term, if anything. That is, if the strategy is to keep tickets artificially scarce then they're under-exploiting the scarcity.

I'm also curious as to where you draw the line on "exploiting" consumers who choose to buy your product. Data is very easy to duplicate so in a sense any scarcity is "artificial" but at the same time netflix has plenty of operating costs. Should they just be charging marginal cost? If an author realised they would make more money by charging higher prices to fewer customers, would that be immoral?

Azath Vitr (D, on 08 July 2019 - 11:25 PM, said:

I was referring to the traditional advantages of capitalism over managed economies (for example, actually existing forms of communism, which relied on a top-down approach to data science that generally proved less effective, even though they tried to collect and process vast amounts of information with the tools then available; but advances in data collection and AI are now making a more bottom-up, real-time approach, with vastly more data and much better predictive models, seem feasible in the near future), and to using these tools in the context of a (primarily or fully) managed economy. In a way it would still maximize a sort of abstract 'capital' in the form of measures of efficiency, adapting the main positive aspects of capitalism. But the equivalent of 'corporate profit' would go to the general welfare, and motivation for human performance (to whatever extent human or transhuman labor it hasn't yet been automated away) would be based on fine-grained, data-driven scientific approaches to what actually motivates the individuals in question most effectively (that can also be ethically implemented, perhaps with virtual proxies---if people want power, for example, or prestige, or whatever 'wealth' in a post-money world might be abstracted into---human brains almost certainly didn't evolve to want 'money', or even to hoard gold, but what money provides, symbolizes, or allows).

But hypercapitalism of the sort you're referring to is already helping to create most of the information processing infrastructure necessary for a managed economy to replace capitalism.

Similarly, labor is increasingly going to be replaced by automation, including intellectual and even creative labor, rendering labor for capital superfluous. (The idea of labor as an intrinsic good is contrary to what major thinkers and authors in the western tradition believed until just the last few centuries. Aside from the potential for meditation (as an accidental consequence of interacting with human physiology, not logical necessity in the transhuman context), labor is odious. The idea that it's otherwise (not counting activities like self-perfection or cultivation), that work in itself is a positive, is an odious ideological tool for manipulating people to labor.

I really don't see it honestly. I don't think better data analytics solve the co-ordination problem to this huge extent; certainly not in the near future. Predictive models - based on previous market behaviour and previous preferences - are not likely to match the ability of a market to co-ordinate those preferences when those technologies can be equally applied within a market system to boost its efficiency. The argument that capitalist market values are immoral has always been stronger than the argument that central predictions will beat markets as a co-ordination mechanism, imo. Advances in computing power and data analytics don't mean we can predict the future after all.

Automation may encroach on large parts of the workforce, but it's not clear that we're going to see the 'end of work' in the near-term. Humanity is also very good at creating new jobs and AI still has major limits for all the evangelism around it. If we automate everything to such a post-scarcity and post-work extent I agree then we're looking at a totally different society which needs a totally different social contract. But this is far from a near-term trend.

[Macros]

My problem with the hyper inflated wages and transfer fees for footballers nowadays is the complete disregard for the fans, the people who make them possible. If people stop watching the games the advertisers and corporate deals fuck off. It's a totally fan driven enterprise. Given that most money comes from sponsorship deals and the like and not gate receipts the riding prices for matches are disgusting.
Look at Bayern, you can get a season ticket for the price of 3/4 games at Arsenal. How?
And replica jersey has doubled in price in the last 10/15.
I used to buy one a year, when they were £35/40 now a too is £60.
Let's say you've got two kids who really want the new strip?
We're on to 3 new kits a season now, where as it used to be changing home and away on alternate seasons.
Money money money, gouging the fans who make it possible. And then the players just go and spit on the fans by demanding an increase on their £200k a week wage packet.

Then you have agents like Minola or whatever his name is agitating their players into moves that documented my bad for their career just so they can get another transfer fee (what was his, £20m for forcing Pogba back to United??)

[Gorefest]

Macros, on 09 July 2019 - 05:50 AM, said:

Then you have agents like Minola or whatever his name is agitating their players into moves that documented my bad for their career just so they can get another transfer fee (what was his, £20m for forcing Pogba back to United??)

Mino Raiola. Yeah, the guy is a scumbag agent. Sends young players like De Ligt into dead-end career paths (Juventus? Seriously?) simply because he can make an extra £10million on the transfer. I am sure there are some decent player agents out there, but you'd need Sherlock Holmes level sleuthism to find them.

[Maark Abbott]

Silencer, on 08 July 2019 - 12:57 PM, said:

Gorefest, on 08 July 2019 - 12:12 PM, said:

Aptorian, on 08 July 2019 - 09:11 AM, said:

Are your national teams not employed by the state? How do they get paid?

No, they are not employed by the state, they are employed by the sports body who oversees the specific event. So for women's football, it would be the national football union (e.g. the Football Association in the UK).

Those sports bodies will be setting the pay and reward levels. Now, women's football might be a big thing in the US, but in the rest of the world where football/soccer is often the number 1 or 2 national sport, men's football is light years ahead of women's football. The types of crowds and funding they draw are in completely different ball parks, it is incomparable. So perhaps the Us women have a point when it comes to their pay for national matches, but in the rest of the world it would at present be unthinkable that women would get the same pay. for comparison, it would be like saying that the US national men's basketball or baseball team would have to earn the same as the women's teams. The fact is that in most countries, women's football hardly sparks any interest (although hopefully tournaments like this will change that over time), so there is hardly any money in it. And as a result hardly any reward.

In all honesty, while I get the argument that the bigger attraction earns bigger rewards in the entertainment business (after all the crowd they draw is how they earn the income to pay wages), and I would be happy to argue that women's teams should pull more investment and then higher pay in order to help raise the profile of the sport (to redress the imbalance caused by lack of historical investment which is arguably the only reason the men's teams are currently higher profile) in response, I do think there is a simpler way to address the problem: just pay the men's teams less. Sports remuneration is absurd and there's no reason for it to be. Is there a lot of hard work and training required? Sure. Does it have entertainment value to society? Sure. Do either of those things deserve higher pay than your average doctor? Fuck no.
So drop the men's income back to something reasonable and pay the women's teams similarly, problem solved.
Sport pay is one of the worst success stories of free market capitalism, tbh. Further made worse by the massive gap between the peak and the norm.
Hollywood generally being another.

To give an example, a top-paid footballer will earn in about 3-4 weeks (sometimes less) what a senior equity partner at the firm I work for does in a YEAR.

It's absolutely ludicrous, especially when you see how poverty is on the up again. No one needs that much money.

[Macros]

a top paid footballer will earn in a month what the average fan in the stands will earn in 30 years work

[Tapper]

Macros, on 09 July 2019 - 05:50 AM, said:

My problem with the hyper inflated wages and transfer fees for footballers nowadays is the complete disregard for the fans, the people who make them possible. If people stop watching the games the advertisers and corporate deals fuck off. It's a totally fan driven enterprise. Given that most money comes from sponsorship deals and the like and not gate receipts the riding prices for matches are disgusting.
Look at Bayern, you can get a season ticket for the price of 3/4 games at Arsenal. How?
And replica jersey has doubled in price in the last 10/15.
I used to buy one a year, when they were £35/40 now a too is £60.
Let's say you've got two kids who really want the new strip?
We're on to 3 new kits a season now, where as it used to be changing home and away on alternate seasons.
Money money money, gouging the fans who make it possible. And then the players just go and spit on the fans by demanding an increase on their £200k a week wage packet.

Then you have agents like Minola or whatever his name is agitating their players into moves that documented my bad for their career just so they can get another transfer fee (what was his, £20m for forcing Pogba back to United??)

Apparently, the amount spent on players (transfers, agents and salary) has not increased by much, %-wise of club turnover in de last two decades. A player on 200k a year roughly earns the same amount of the club's wage budget as a guy earning 25k would have had X years ago and no fan wants their club to say "we're not going to spend".

As for Raiola and sorts: Raiola (or rather, his cut of the transfer fees) is representing a lot of what is wrong with the transfer market, but there is no denying that his players profit as much as he does. He is uniquely suited to move players, even if there are question marks surrounding them: say he manages to move Pogba to Real after a disappointing few years in Manchester, you could say he did a top job for the guy: he arranges an obvious promotion from the #5 in the UK to one of the two biggest clubs in the world, where based on performance Pogba should probably end up at a Europa League team and take a massive hit in salary.

[Cause]

Okay we got side tracked from the American issue to just football wages in general. May need a thread split.

Going back to my point though. Both the male and female teams 'play soccer'. The argument of same work so same pay does seem to have some merit. I cant quite nail it down but I also feel like its not true. The womens team is even better than the mens team in that they win, yet I still feel like its comparing apples to ornages. The prize pool in mens soccer will remain orders of magnitude greater because it has so many more fans. Irrespective if both teams play soccer, train the same hours etc. Also I still think the wage gap in general is not a real thing. The best argument I have ever seen is that if women really did work for 70 cents on the dollar and did the same work as their male colleagues all the Ayn Rand loving billionaires out there would only hire female staff and save 30 on the bottom line.

Macros, on 09 July 2019 - 05:50 AM, said:

My problem with the hyper inflated wages and transfer fees for footballers nowadays is the complete disregard for the fans, the people who make them possible. If people stop watching the games the advertisers and corporate deals fuck off. It's a totally fan driven enterprise. Given that most money comes from sponsorship deals and the like and not gate receipts the riding prices for matches are disgusting.
Look at Bayern, you can get a season ticket for the price of 3/4 games at Arsenal. How?
And replica jersey has doubled in price in the last 10/15.
I used to buy one a year, when they were £35/40 now a too is £60.

What I have never understood is that those replica jersies are billboards. They should be given away for free since your now advertising ten products everywhere you walk. I hate even buying a brand name shirt unless the logo is the size of my nail or smaller.

[HoosierDaddy]

What in the world are we talking about in here?

Outrageous sports salaries?

[Macros]

assuming a thread split is impending I'll carry on regardless

We loosely had the debate a few years ago when the wimbledon prize money was made equal.

the argument then was more people tuned into the mens, and the mens played 5 sets compared to the womens 3, so it a lower prize packet could have been argued as paid per set.

not the same for a set length game like football

[Grief]

Thread split . There's also a separate thread for automation; a few of the posts here still discuss it because I couldn't find a clean solution but let's try to keep them distinct from here.

[worry]

Now it's gonna look like I was posting in a sports thread. My nerd cred is all shot to hell.

[Grief]

If anyone has creative topics to split worry's posts into... asking for another mod

[Silencer]

Grief, on 09 July 2019 - 12:06 AM, said:

Silencer, on 08 July 2019 - 10:58 PM, said:

To be clear, I include a reduction in wages for the corporate side of the teams in my previous post.

That could be achieved through a 100% tax above a certain income threshold, and I'm not inherently opposed to that, but I do think that comparatively the income of sportsball teams is skewed horrifically and not in a way that should be celebrated. Same as Hollywood.

Nor do I think lauding it as an outcome of economics makes sense, given the whole system has been set up to create artificial scarcity of tickets and therefore inflate the prices accordingly. It's at best a very successful con and at worst the natural outcome of most "X as a service" models that are becoming more popular in other industries. It would, after all, be very easy to restrict the number of times a Netflix documentary can be viewed and so start charging higher one off viewing prices- that isn't a success story, even if Netflix employees get paid more as a result. It's a manipulation of the market to exploit consumers. Much like most big sportsball events and leagues. It just happens to result in unreasonably compensated employees in this particular case.

Firstly, as far as I'm aware the money in football comes more from TV deals, merchandising, and sponsorships rather than from tickets. Guardian figures suggest this is certainly true for the premier league. Secondly, I'm curious as to why you think game tickets are "artificially" scarce. There are physical limits on the number of matches top athletes can play. There are physical limits on the number of seats the stadiums house. The fact that the industry is generally trying to push both of these numbers higher suggests that they see a stronger economic rationale for increasing the number of tickets where they can rather than keeping them scarce. The significant waiting lists for club season tickets similarly suggests that tickets are mostly likely underpriced in the short-term, if anything. That is, if the strategy is to keep tickets artificially scarce then they're under-exploiting the scarcity.

I'm also curious as to where you draw the line on "exploiting" consumers who choose to buy your product. Data is very easy to duplicate so in a sense any scarcity is "artificial" but at the same time netflix has plenty of operating costs. Should they just be charging marginal cost? If an author realised they would make more money by charging higher prices to fewer customers, would that be immoral?

So, exactly, yes. The tickets are artificially scarce because there is now an unlimited number of viewers of the game. Now, one can argue there is a difference between watching the game in person and watching it on TV, but at the end of the day it's the same game being observed. Those TV deals, merchandising, and sponsorships are why tickets should be a dime a dozen. Hell, make them free, make them a raffle based system (at least then when people are getting scalped they wouldn't be able to blame the cost on the fact the original tickets are stupidly expensive).

In all seriousness though, my point is that ticket prices have increased as time goes on, despite other revenue streams coming into place, and the fact that the number of viewers of the event is now basically infinite. And I don't think it's unreasonable to say that just because there is demand for physical tickets, those physical tickets are not overpriced. I feel the same way about movie ticket prices - they keep increasing, while the same is true of the profits of the movie industry and accessibility to view - so where is the damn reduction in cost of physical DVDs, movie tickets, etc?
The answer could be one of two things - I'm unreasonably lumping (stadium seats, TV views, etc)/(theater seats/Netflix/DVDs/etc) together, and going to the actual stadium to watch a live event is simply a different product that has a different value. Or, these companies could be milking their fans for money across all these avenues to the tune of endlessly increasing profits (potentially while deliberately furthering the belief that going to a 'live' event is somehow different to viewing it on TV in a way that justifies more cost for the tickets).


As for the line on exploiting consumers, well, most industries passed that a long time ago. Netflix should be covering their operating costs and making a tidy profit to invest in future acquisitions and R&D, nothing more, and that author would definitely be acting immorally by creating artificial scarcity (e.g. restricting access through inflated pricing relative to demand). Also while data is easy to duplicate it still carries overheads to deliver, so there is still some increase in cost to distribute, but effectively yes, anything that can be delivered digitally should cost a fraction of the price of a physical copy due to minimal distribution costs in comparison. This is why it's insane that Steam charges similar prices for its games to a physical disk in a store - the game developer still has to cover their costs, but the actual reason for the pricing is that publisher profits are like 3000% what they were 30 years ago and they want them to keep increasing. So even though more people are buying the games, the prices are not decreasing, and there is actually zero valid economic strain on the developers to justify that. (e.g. yes, costs to make games have increased, but the profit margins far outstrip that cost still, so there should be no increase in price.) Same for sports teams - there has been no increase in cost to produce a game of football (except for, you know, artificially inflated player and manager wages - which are also being used to generate hype, "how much will this trade be for", "who will be the highest paid athlete", that sort of thing) and yet ticket prices are up, and profits are waaaaay up. Why are the profits up? What has changed that would lead to both an increase in cost to view the game AND an increase in profits? Nothing, it's just greed. Greed that coincidentally benefits some athletes, sure. But it still at the end of the day is exploitation of consumers.
I think any company that is increasing it's prices without a corresponding increase in cost, purely to deliver more profits, is exploiting its consumers at this point. They are prioritising their shareholder's desires for increased profits over and above their consumer's wellbeing, knowing that most people will pay the increased price even if it puts them (further) into debt, because the entire system now is built around consumers having excess amounts of credit and living outside their means.

And if you're thinking that sounds like a fundamental issue with captialism as it stands today, you're correct. Company profits keep soaring, while wages are stagnant, and people can't afford to pay rent or mortgages. That system is, fundamentally, unsustainable. Which is why we keep having crashes, and why those crashes are getting worse. Sports teams are just one example, with particularly egregious wages to their players at the expense of their fans - but it's honestly not that different to the wages of most corporate executives at the expense of their consumers, and in both cases the people who are lower down the totem pole (staff for a company, lower profile teams for sports) get none of it.
You could charge a fraction of the ticket prices today, thereby screwing your fans less, and still pay these sports stars extremely well. But why do that when you can charge them more, right?

[Gorefest]

Shareholders? Most (European) clubs don't have shareholders. And many are struggling to make ends meet. You are referring only to a select top flight of clubs with most of your comments, I believe. The Manchester Cities and the Barcelonas of this world. Heck, in Germany clubs aren't even allowed to be in private ownership.

[Silencer]

Gorefest, on 13 July 2019 - 08:00 AM, said:

Shareholders? Most (European) clubs don't have shareholders. And many are struggling to make ends meet. You are referring only to a select top flight of clubs with most of your comments, I believe. The Manchester Cities and the Barcelonas of this world. Heck, in Germany clubs aren't even allowed to be in private ownership.

Oh, to be sure. Shareholders aren't entirely necessary to my point, though. If the money is going to managers/owners/what have you, it's the same end result. The reference to shareholders was specifically in the context of the broader argument I was making, which encompasses other industries, just to be clear.

[Tsundoku]

Everyone concerned above a certain income (plucks number out of arse) - say $250k per year - needs to take a 90% pay cut with the returned money going to grass roots clubs, juniors, public welfare charities etc.
That way the top bastards stay on top for their precious egos and fragile self-esteem, and on "just" a few million a year instead of 50 million. Money goes where it should, and the entire planet gets a huge reality check.

Same goes for CEOs et al. If an organisation makes a megaprofit, but it's workers see none of it, the execs get pruned 95%. No performance bonuses by sacking thousands to increase the share price above a magical point either. If you have to sack workers by the thousands, you cannot be doing a good job and are therefore ineligible for a performance bonus. Which is capped at a few % anyway.

I believe in capitalism - just not free market, laissez faire, unregulated capitalism.
Dickens novels are cautionary tales, not aspirational fantasies (fuck you Coalition, Tories and GOP).

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 13 July 2019 - 08:29 AM

[Macros]

We had the CEO of Samsung on site a few weeks ago.
His annual pull down is about £200 million