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Post by tonyc on Nov 13, 2014 20:01:09 GMT -5
John, I agree that most institutions eventually suffer "hardening of the arteries", but despite my complaints about the MLBPA, which has gotten too powerful in some respects, I am in one of the few medical unions in the state of Colorado, and for the most part it's a very good thing. I've seen nonunion nurses set up and fired just before their pensions, and other workers in this state fired for attending a parent's funeral. We work hard and deserve a bit of security. Jimed, glad you are conscious food-wise, and work hard at it. I've made diet an art, since learning the ropes from a Biologist friend, in the days of Jim Rice's prime. My goal is healthy, cheap and little or no cooking. It can be done, but involves scouring your town's health food stores (and you may be out of luck if not in towns like Boulder here, or NY where I grew up) for a combination of ready to eat take out, inexpensive salad bars, and healthy volume based (cheap) restaurants like Chipotle, or cheap Chinese.
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Post by jmei on Nov 14, 2014 8:33:38 GMT -5
This is supply and demand 101. If the owner could raise prices and still sell out the stadium, he would have done so already. Prices are already set at the highest level the market can bear. Again, you have the causal relationship backwards. Salary levels are set by revenues, not the other way around. I took Micro and Macro back in the day....and "breezed" with a C. I understand supply and demand...but I don't think it as exact as I think your stating it. Just so I understand..are you saying that the price point is a known commodity and therefore inelastic to player salary? I mean we're not just plotting widgets on an x an y axis here...are we? It's why I hated economics..it really is voodoo science. Baseball (and sports in general) are fairly monopolistic enterprises with very inelastic demand. If ticket prices are too high, it's not like every other industry where a competitor would come in and offer a comparable product for cheaper because for most sports teams, there's a culture/fandom that develops around that specific franchise. To some extent, baseball tickets do compete with other high-end entertainment options (concerts, other sports leagues, etc.), but even so, there's a relatively low cross-elasticity of demand (i.e., if you're a die-hard Red Sox fan, you aren't suddenly going to swap out your Red Sox tickets for MLS tickets just bcause the latter represents more of a value proposition). This means owners can set ticket prices at the rate which maximizes total revenue-- at the level that if they were any higher, enough fans would stop going to the game such that they'd lose money. Thus, ticket prices are already basically as high as the market will bear, and so if costs (i.e., salary) increase, it's coming out of the owner's profit and wouldn't raise prices any higher than they already are.
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Post by jmei on Nov 14, 2014 8:43:13 GMT -5
This is supply and demand 101. If the owner could raise prices and still sell out the stadium, he would have done so already. Prices are already set at the highest level the market can bear. Again, you have the causal relationship backwards. Salary levels are set by revenues, not the other way around. This is true in theory, but definitely not true in reality. The Red Sox sold out Fenway for a decade, you think they couldn't have raised prices and still sold out? Prices are kept lower than they could be, probably to earn goodwill among fans to increase merchandise sales and TV revenue. If player salaries rose enough that they thought that raising ticket prices would hurt them less in terms of non-ticket revenue than putting out a worse team would, they could end up raising prices in response to ticket prices rising. Generally you're right though, demand drives ticket prices. Two things: First, yes, I do think Red Sox tickets are essentially as expensive as the market will bear. Since Henry and co. purchased the team, ticket price growth has far, far outpaced inflation, and tickets for a Red Sox game are one of the most expensive in all of sports. The alleged sellout streak is mostly an accounting trick, and on any given night, there are plenty of available seats at Fenway. Seocnd, even if you're right and ticket prices are set slightly lower than the theoretical maximum in order to cultivate long-term demand by giving the everyman an opportunity to see games, it doesn't really change my argument. Revenues are still a good deal higher than costs and ticket pricing decisions are based off fan demand rather than payroll levels. Remember, player salary is mostly a fixed cost (i.e., if you sell more tickets, you don't need to hire more players), which means for owners, the calculus is simple: just maximize total revenue, which depends on a factor (fan demand) that is mostly independent of salary levels.
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Nov 14, 2014 15:25:52 GMT -5
For what it's worth, I wasn't referring to doing an entire podcast on the minor league diet - I was referring to the class action lawsuit and general MiLB player lifestyle.
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Post by moonstone2 on Nov 14, 2014 17:50:18 GMT -5
I will begrudge some players and agents maximizing earnings. This is endemic of the ever increasing gulf of wealth distribution which is responsible for many of the social ills of this country, and planet. On a more concrete level, fans end up paying the taxes when cities have to build new stadiums to satisfy the ever-growing player greed. At least for the moment there is a degree of loyalty in hockey players to their group and not just the cash. First off I absolutely believe that the increasing gulf of wealth distribution is a huge danger in our society. Middle class consumption drives the economy and if the growth in national income goes to a very few, ultimately only debt can drive consumer spending. That of course can come to a screeching halt very quickly as we saw if the debt is called and large swaths of people don't pay as we saw in 2008. When that happens, the government has to step in, leaving very little money left over for investment that might drive the economic capacity of the country going forward. The main reason for this phenomenon in my opinion is the decline of unions. Only 16% of the country is unionized and almost all new economy jobs in tech and other places are non-union. Logically those who are in charge of dividing a pie will divide it in such a way that maximizes their personal income and wealth. That means virtually all increases in societal wealth will accrue to those who are in charge of dividing the pie. The only check against this kind of power comes in the form of union representation. Unions are the only entity that help to insure that workers and not management receives a fair amount of the growth in revenue that they helped create. As this applies to baseball players, they are the product hence they deserve a large amount of the value that they create. Think anyone would pay to see jmei and I play for the Red Sox? Think again. Yet even so, the owners take home 60% of an $8B revenue pie. That's more than enough to pay for their operations and make a substantial profit, especially if the trend of rising revenues continues. There is not a single player who will make as much over their career as even the poorest owner. This even though, no one is coming to the park to see John Henry. One of the things that constantly amazes me in this country is that many are so willing to heep blame on unions and poor people when they know that they aren't the groups who are taking the vast majority of the wealth. How is it that a player who freely shops his services around the league and is paid $20M a year is greedy while the guy who makes $200M a year is not? As jmei pointed out, if a salary cap were to lower the players portion of revenues from 40% to 30%, you ain't seeing a nickel of that 10%. All of it will accrue to the owners, and if history is any guide they won't be spending it on giving you greater access to the game. Is $20M a lot of money compared to a teacher or a coal miner? Absolutely. But there is no reason to think that that money is worse off in the players pocket than it is in the pockets of the owners.
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Post by tonyc on Nov 15, 2014 0:24:59 GMT -5
Finally, an articulate essay on behalf of unions- so much is stated in negative terms without such clear thought. Just the way the Koch brothers billions have a backed a non-stop spin assault that is about to enter the supreme court to block our national health insurance. In the movie Sicko, prior to its passage, it made clear what a disgrace the lack of health coverage was in this country, even compared to Cuba, with the huge profits going to CEO's of insurance companies, while people who couldn't afford preventative regular care would instead show up in ER's eventually with acute and more expensive conditions.
The masses were just also similarly deceived into voting for politicians who will attempt to remove our entire social safety net to give such executives and the Koch brothers a return on their investment- with such chicanery made possible by a "Supreme" court which removed all barriers to campaign finance limits.
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