Comparative Advantage, Opera Edition
The American League believes in comparative advantage, and has a designated hitter bat for the pitcher. I prefer this: I believe in comparative advantage and division of labor (and being a White Sox fan from age 5, I like the American League anyway).
This afternoon we heard a performance of Pagliacci, before which an announcer informed the audience that the soprano was ill, but would act the role while another—the designated soprano—sang from the side of the stage. The acting was better than usual, and so was the singing—an illustration here of comparative advantage. The overall effect wasn’t good: Opera is both acting and singing, and it was absurd and disconcerting to separate them. The production function for opera requires one person doing both—division of labor makes no sense in this case.
(HT to FWH)
Labor Peace in Baseball May Not Last Forever
The following is a guest post by David Berri, a Professor of Economics at Southern Utah University. He is also the lead author of Stumbling on Wins, the general manager of the sports-economics blog Wages of Wins, and is a frequent contributor to the Freakonomics blog.
Last week I looked at the labor negotiations in the NBA. Since then, the NBA appears to have reached an agreement with its workers, ending the latest dispute in professional North American sports.
Over the last three decades, labor disputes have become a common feature in professional sports. In fact – as The Wages of Wins indicated– relative to non-sports industries, labor disputes are about 25 times more likely in professional sports. So the recent lockout in the NBA was hardly surprising. Read More »
A Sports Economist’s Thoughts on Moneyball: A Guest Post by J.C. Bradbury
J.C. Bradbury is a long-time friend and contributor to the Freakonomics blog. An associate professor of economics at Kennesaw State University, Bradbury is the author of two books on baseball: The Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, and Hot Stove Economics: Understanding Baseball’s Second Season. For years, he covered the intersection of baseball and economics on his Sabernomics blog.
So with the new movie Moneyball out, we wanted to get J.C.’s thoughts on how well the book translates onto the big screen, and whether it does justice to the wonky, sabermetrics approach to baseball.
An Economist’s Thoughts on Moneyball
By J.C. Bradbury
When it was published in 2003, the book Moneyball generated a buzz in the field of economics because it covered several topics economists like, such as constrained maximization, market efficiency, entrepreneurship, and statistical analysis. To most people, economics is boring: it’s a class they took because they had to. Author Michael Lewis introduced important economic concepts through a venue that millions of Americans pay to watch. As a book, it succeeded, but I was skeptical that it could work as a movie. I was wrong. Even my wife, who only reluctantly agreed to see the movie with me, enjoyed it. Read More »
Is David Ortiz the New Yogi Berra?
Here’s what the Red Sox slugger had to say recently about the sour streak his team has been on lately, endangering its playoff hopes:
“There’s nobody to blame but everybody.”
If I were a CEO, or the president of something, or someone with even the slightest responsibility for anything, I would tuck this quote in my back pocket and whip it out when things get grim.
and 
. You can also watch it on 