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centaurrential · 4 years ago

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“The Spice Jar”

“Let me live the lie, So long as it gets me through the day.”

For a long time it baffled me why activists would choose to devote so much energy to a cause that always seemed like overkill to me: free speech. I suppose the reason for that is because I grew up in a fairly liberal environment in one of the most liberal countries in the world. My feelings of security in the realm of free speech were a result of direct contact with a family that, more often than not, found itself on the right side of political privilege. Juxtaposed by the harsh realities experienced by another portion of my family (but not by me) under dictatorship in Yugoslavia, it seemed like the threat to free expression was a dead issue, a thing left in another world, in the past and locked in a strait jacket, never to seriously perpetrate again. How naive.

I see now that the cause is not overkill at all, but rather in need of periodic resuscitation, with the medics on stand-by; and the best medics would be those who excel in “aspect perception”. Like evil, issues needing that particular kind of attention crop up in unexpected places, and so much vigilance in monitoring the sneaks is due. And a simple mandate of “free expression for all” is stupid and insufficient, because as we always see, static gaming rules can produce matches with vastly different phenotypes. (The existence of “language games” was originally observed by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, so I give him his due credit here.)

I spoke of ideology in my last posting, and wherever one wishes to locate (and I don’t use that term accidentally) themselves on the grid of political persuasions, there will always be conceptual pockets that are purposely left unfilled, often because no one has the guts to touch them for fear of being labelled too politically incorrect, or undiplomatic. But even more radical are those ideas that don’t even find themselves on that grid, because they lie so far outside of the limitations imposed by the prevailing paradigm. A person brave enough to attempt to give validity to those ideas is not only denigrated for being “uneducated” but crucified for being a downright dumbass, and possibly psychotic, if the definition of psychosis is a “detachment from ‘reality’.” But what we think of as reality is merely an idea that has been agreed-upon by people who happen to have sufficient charisma and power to persuade others.

I’ll give you an example: I have, I believe, collected enough evidence that demonstrates astrology is true. Because of this passing interest, I once mentioned to a relative that I was reading a book on the influence of astrology in history, political and otherwise. She asked who the author was and what his credentials were. Nothing “noteworthy” there, and because of that, she actually insulted me and declared it preposterous that I, a usually intelligent person, would consider an argument not backed by the mainstream meritocracy. It’s crucial to note that she has a doctorate in history. I didn’t even have to ask her why she was so appalled, because her answer would have been the same dished to me, on a silver platter, out of fucking Buckingham Palace, that is given to me by every other lazy asshole who considers astrology to be archaic and an immediate write-off. She would have said that “all the studies” performed on astrology show CLEARLY that the “daily horoscope” and the “sun signs” are all bullshit and believers suffer from a case of confirmation bias. Academics believe that mythology and established archetypes have value and are therefore worth studying. And there is a tight link between them and the representational entities found in astrology. But none of “The Educated” give enough of a damn to investigate its complex grammar (see last posting), and the precision required of any astrologer worth their salt.

My little rant about astrology isn’t meant to be a full-scale defence of the practice, but I am trying to demonstrate something. The shallowness displayed in these disses to astrology is indicative of the fact that things already thought to be errant are not even encompassed in the span of that “grid of persuasions” I mentioned earlier. (The grid may be two- or three-dimensional, but who cares?) Those who are already convinced something is “wrong” simply won’t go to great lengths to play the devil’s advocate and explore why there may be a teensy-weensy chance it is RIGHT.

In my mind, if it’s been spoken of, then you should do your homework and read between the lines.

They say, if you can’t find yourself anywhere on that grid, there must be something fundamentally wrong with you. You’re crazed, you’re spacey, out to lunch, et cetera. The grid seems to offer a menu of choices, various combinations of platitudes you are free to choose from. So my point is this: if enough people, with enough influence, tell you that something is off the table, they’re telling you that not even the ingredients are available to conjure something worthy of bringing to the table. Therefore, to those who still hunger: you must look elsewhere.

I can’t say with certainty whether or not there was some grand agenda to marginalize and persecute people who can see outside of things (*cough*lust*cough), but if there is (I use the present tense cause...duh) it’s DEFINITELY ideological. And the reason it’s so fucking scary is because, if your wild ideas reach a certain density, the majority won’t even listen to you. And by ‘majority’ I don’t mean 50.1% of the population, I mean the people you interact with who possess a disproportionate amount of power. And further, by ‘power’ I mean the capacity to effect significant change in something, or to neutralize a challenge to a pre-existing situation. Anyway, never mind disagreement--you might as well not have a mouth at all. Even if your ‘kooky’ ideas are not that dense, the introduction of even one idea that doesn’t fall within the rules of the prevailing paradigm leads to others viewing you with suspicion and the belief that there is a crack in the philosophical foundation of your life.

To give you a visual: think of the scene in The Matrix when the Agents cause Neo’s mouth to grow over with skin, and he freaks right the fuck out. He falls backwards into the wall, as if to put physical distance between himself and this monstrosity. Speaking--expression--is so innate to us as humans with personalities. To add insult to injury, many of us find some things in this world that utterly compel us--that which ignites our “fire”, that which we cannot ignore no matter how detrimental we are told it can be, no matter how hard we try to resist.

...Who am I kidding?! I’m on a roll (!!!), so I’d like my readers to consider the following: We believe that the past and present both exist, yet we have enough trouble interpreting them. Why should interpreting what the future holds be any different? I think we all know why people are so vehemently opposed to that idea...it’s kind of the elephant in the room.

~~~

Now, I work in a grocery store. For a moment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were all the rage, with people touting us as ‘heroes’ and heaping thanks on us because we’re “essential workers”. Or at least, we were. That died fast. But we’ve always been heroes. I don’t mean to insult my customers, the majority of whom I love interacting with. But I sense that some people just need to be put in their place.

The supermarket is an interesting one because it’s like a little laboratory for human behaviour studies--but it’s better, because it’s not artificial. Virtually every person on this planet leads a life that revolves around food, and when we don’t have good food, we are sad or grumpy. I understand the feeling of having one’s heart set on something and the disappointment experienced when our expectations aren’t met. But I plead with you: try thanking your lucky stars every now and then for all the options you have, as a result of lowly grocery workers.

Everyday, everything is splayed out for us to pick and choose from. And for that benefit, producers apply their intelligence to generate AND to coordinate, so that things are always “in stock”. Luckily all the food waste that’s generated in the name of “looking nice” (I’m serious) now goes to the food bank. If that didn’t happen, some of us would have to force ourselves to ignore the fact that the only final utility of some of that product was to ensure our shelves were pleasing to the consumer eye. An understudy, if you will: an immensely complex thing, formed for the sole purpose of “just in case”.

Our lives consist of an economy that’s so sophisticated we really do not have to think twice about having SOME kind of satisfying meal. If not our first choice, then our second or third. Show some bloody respect. Right now, we’re all able to shop in relative luxury, but when shit hits the fan--like for example, perhaps, a prolonged power outage occurs--we’ll be yearning for the days when we had to settle for spinach because the all the kale was gone.

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the janitors, custodians, cleaning staff, and the specialized COVID sanitizers of the world. The mundane reality is so backwards sometimes. It’s like evil took all that was good and pure and turned it on its head. There is a premium placed on orderliness and cleanliness. Wash your hands for 20 seconds, apply hand sanitizer, kill those bacteria and kill ‘em dead. Ok, you don’t want to get sick--fine. But large-scale operations that exploit people who help you reach the “godliness” that is cleanliness, yet rob them of respect, appropriate compensation, and appreciation--you are grotesque.

So, money. I’m not well-versed in economics, but I call it like I see it. The nice thing about money, and the reason it’s so widely used, is because it’s an easy tool that supposedly ‘justly’ facilitates exchanges of goods and services between people. If something is expensive enough to the point at which you pass the threshold between “justifiable” and “unjustifiable”, that’s the only reason a person needs to not buy something. And the immediate source of justification is the psychology of the individual. Of course, there are many factors that contribute to the rationalization process.

Money may be easy, but money doesn’t reflect the true value of things, and it’s because money doesn’t reflect the true value of things that it is easy. Imagine you bartering spices for someone else’s dairy cow. In order to save time, you’d better hope that your bartering partner and you agree quickly what amounts and what types of spices are justifiable in trading for a cow. The processes that allow the accessibility of both types of goods are different. You and your bartering partner may not agree: they may want more, you think they should get less. BUT, this person you’re engaging with is the only source of a cow for you! Now imagine a plumber, for instance, trading a repair for a haircut. You help me, I help you, and we apply our respective skills toward that symbiosis. Is the haircut important enough to the plumber that they are willing to provide a service in return, sans money? Is the hairstylist appreciative enough of the plumber’s work to design and make them look good for free? A haircut and plumbing services are similar in some ways, but entirely different in others. The function and utility of each is different, and the consequences they generate permeate lives differently. Consequences may be far-reaching, or they may occupy less space in the progression of your life. A tree compared to a blade of grass. That is the nature of choice in this life. And when money leaves the equation, it’s like a dark sheath has been torn away from the true values of things, which are realistically very complicated.

People generally do act rationally, but it’s not in the way neoliberal economists think. The mistake they’ve made is assuming that a ‘rational choice’ is the same for everyone, across the board. Or maybe that’s what they want you to think. Liar, liar, pants on fire. What is rational to one person is not always rational to another. Much of it is subjective, at least if a person is true to themselves. And people’s inherent personalities are different, and therefore their specific motives are different. It’s not clear that there’s an absolute benefit that should be maximized (other than the obvious quest for happiness and avoidance of pain), because the true value of things isn’t strictly definable.

Think in these terms: What fuels our economy is consumerism. When there’s a recession, people have less money and therefore will purchase less, and so the goal to rejuvenate the economy is to get people buying things again. It doesn’t matter too much what, just as long as they’re spending money.

Now consider the resurgence in the ‘minimalist’ ideal. People are starting to wake up and see that having all sorts of shit just because you have the capability to buy it (and because money doesn’t reflect consequences) is destructive, and not only to the environment and the oppressed, but also to the soul. There are plenty of people in this world who absolutely cannot, in good conscience, own a lot of shit and be okay with themselves. This is a thing that I know for certain compels people. To deny this is to deny peace of mind. So, what place does a passion for minimalism have in neoliberal theory?

In what some like to call a post-modern world (a scary thought in itself; does that imply the end of history?) we increasingly find ourselves detached from the larger picture, and that is NOT good. What we see “in front” bears few clues into what happens behind the scenes. People don’t farm, we go to grocery stores. People don’t weave and knit, we shop at the mall. Things are presented in such a refined way that it actually takes some mental work and introspection to develop gratitude for the people working to make us comfortable, often at their own expense, and often not because they are at liberty to do so. Coercion and rationality have a love-hate relationship.

To tie things up, please pay attention to the source of your information. I don’t mean “Angelfire websites” and all that shit, I mean the individuals and groups of individuals in charge of disseminating information. Karl Marx developed Marxist/communist theory because of his situation in life. He had motives, like everyone else. Motives can come from a place of genuine compassion, sympathy for the meek, and a belief that everyone deserves kindness and less pain in their lives. But motives can also be positively diabolical, and when such motives inhabit the hearts of people with influence, evil spreads insidiously, like a metastasized cancer gone undetected.

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vale-lapena-blog1 · 6 years ago

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One of the best articles I’ve read all year.

“That realization recast my recent struggles: Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young. Life has always been hard, but many millennials are unequipped to deal with the particular ways in which it’s become hard for us.”

“I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset. I’d worked hard in college, but as an old millennial, the expectations for labor were tempered. We liked to say we worked hard, played hard — and there were clear boundaries around each of those activities. Grad school, then, is where I learned to work like a millennial, which is to say, all the time. My new watchword was “Everything that’s good is bad, everything that’s bad is good”: Things that should’ve felt good (leisure, not working) felt bad because I felt guilty for not working; things that should’ve felt “bad” (working all the time) felt good because I was doing what I thought I should and needed to be doing in order to succeed.”

““Branding” is a fitting word for this work, as it underlines what the millennial self becomes: a product. And as in childhood, the work of optimizing that brand blurs whatever boundaries remained between work and play. There is no “off the clock” when at all hours you could be documenting your on-brand experiences or tweeting your on-brand observations. The rise of smartphones makes these behaviors frictionless and thus more pervasive, more standardized. In the early days of Facebook, you had to take pictures with your digital camera, upload them to your computer, and post them in albums. Now, your phone is a sophisticated camera, always ready to document every component of your life — in easily manipulated photos, in short video bursts, in constant updates to Instagram Stories — and to facilitate the labor of performing the self for public consumption.”

“We are encouraged to strategize and scheme to find places, times, and roles where we can be effectively put to work,” Harris, the Kids These Days author, writes. “Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools, crafted from embryos to be lean, mean production machines.”

“The modern Millennial, for the most part, views adulthood as a series of actions, as opposed to a state of being,” an article in Elite Daily explains. “Adulting therefore becomes a verb.” “To adult” is to complete your to-do list — but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends.”

“To describe millennial burnout accurately is to acknowledge the multiplicity of our lived reality — that we’re not just high school graduates, or parents, or knowledge workers, but all of the above — while recognizing our status quo. We’re deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we’ll begin thriving. The carrot dangling in front of us is the dream that the to-do list will end, or at least become far more manageable.”

“In their writing on homelessness, social psychologist Devon Price has said that “laziness,” at least in the way most of us generally conceive of it, simply does not exist. “If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you,” they write, “it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.” My behavior didn’t make sense to me because I was missing part of my context: burnout. I was too ashamed to admit I was experiencing it. I fancied myself too strong to succumb to it. I had narrowed my definition of burnout to exclude my own behaviors and symptoms. But I was wrong. I think I have some of the answers to the specific questions that made me start writing this essay. Yours are probably somewhat or substantially different. I don’t have a plan of action, other than to be more honest with myself about what I am and am not doing and why, and to try to disentangle myself from the idea that everything good is bad and everything bad is good. This isn’t a task to complete or a line on a to-do list, or even a New Year’s resolution. It’s a way of thinking about life, and what joy and meaning we can derive not just from optimizing it,but living it. Which is another way of saying: It’s life’s actual work.”

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jeroldlockettus · 6 years ago

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Not Just Another Labor Force (Ep. 365)

Patriots quarterback Tom Brady has played 19 seasons in the N.F.L. but the average player only lasts 3.5 years. (Photo: Dustin Bradford/Getty)

If you think talent and hard work give top athletes all the leverage to succeed, think again. As employees in the Sports-Industrial Complex, they’ve got a tight earnings window, a high injury rate, little choice in where they work — and a very early forced retirement. (Ep. 6 of “The Hidden Side of Sports” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

The Super Bowl is by far the biggest sports event in the United States. It draws the most viewers, the most attention, and of course the most money. As we’ve been discussing in this “Hidden Side of Sports” series, the sports-industrial complex has grown tremendously over the past few decades; it generates roughly $70 billion a year. But once you strip away the massive TV revenues, the increasingly sophisticated arenas and stadiums, all the merchandise — what most people care about is watching the players play. How much do we care about the players themselves? That is a different question. Most of us do profess to care about the livelihood and well-being of employees in various industries. Does this apply to athletes? Or is sports too unlike other industries to think of its employees as just another labor force? Let’s find out; let’s find out what it’s like to be on the labor side of the equation in a business that often seems — and never more than on Super Bowl Sunday — to be nothing but superstars and fat paychecks and game-day glory.

DeMaurice SMITH: Yes, the National Football League generates billions of dollars. But the reality of the facts of our business are rather stark.

That’s DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the the N.F.L. Players Association, the union that represents the athletes.

SMITH: Our players play for approximately three-and-a-half years.

On average, that is; some careers are obviously longer. And every career, at some point, is derailed by pain.

SMITH: The injury rate is 100 percent. Owners tend to own teams for decades, if not generations. What the players have tried to do throughout history is just to make sure that they get what they believe is their fair share.

According to a lot of the athletes we’ve been speaking with, in a variety of sports, a fair share is hard to come by. Many feel they don’t have much control over their destinies — financial and otherwise.

Domonique FOXWORTH: It’s an interesting kind of irony in that sports is a place that we consider as close to a meritocracy as we have, and you look at the field and we convince ourselves that once you step out there, it’s all fair, and it feels that way. That doesn’t extend to the business of sports.

This is true of the biggest sports, like football …

SMITH: The owners are people who are used to getting their way.

And the sports that draw smaller crowds …

Kerri WALSH JENNINGS: The athletes have no leverage. It’s almost like the abuser-abusee relationship, where the abusee gives excuses for being abused. That’s exactly what’s happening with regard to domestic volleyball here in the U.S.

This can happen early in an athlete’s career …

FOXWORTH: Most people understand that college sports is professional sports. They generate a substantial amount of revenue, and that revenue goes to lots of people who are not the labor.

It can happen to athletes at their peak …

Shawn JOHNSON: The way these contracts are structured is these athletes aren’t paid any money upfront. The only way they earn money is by winning medals.

And it extends into retirement — which, for athletes, is an inherently early retirement.

J.J. REDICK: I think about what I’m going to do after basketball on a daily basis. And there’s a level of fear of the other side.]

* * *

The seeds of a sports career are typically planted quite early.

FOXWORTH: I was eight when I decided I wanted to be a professional football player.

That’s Domonique Foxworth. He played in the N.F.L. from 2005 to 2011.

FOXWORTH: It’s weird, I was young enough then to be naive enough to think, obviously, I’m going to play in the N.F.L. I started getting invited to football camps. And that’s when it started to become a business. When I showed up and it was like, “Oh, they’re evaluating me.” This is where the dream either continues to go forward or dies.

WALSH JENNINGS: The very first moment I played volleyball, I fell in love with it.

That’s the three-time Olympic gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings.

WALSH JENNINGS: And people talk about their “aha moments” and these pivotal times in their lives where things are different. I had that moment when I was 10, in the fifth grade. And I literally just fell in love with the dance of the game and the learning everything that had to do with volleyball. I loved it. I was a geek for it.

Mark TEIXEIRA: I was a sophomore in high school and pro scouts started showing up to my games.

And that’s Mark Teixeira.

TEIXEIRA: And that’s when I was talking to my coaches and talking to my dad and talking to some of these scouts, saying “Wow, I could actually play professional baseball. How cool is that?”

Teixeira wound up playing 14 seasons in the major leagues. He was a three-time All-Star, a World Series champion. But back in 1998, he was just a teenager with a lot of potential.

TEIXEIRA: I was the 12th-rated prospect in the draft that year, my senior year.

He could have played college baseball first or gone straight to the pros through Major League Baseball’s amateur draft. The draft is how teams in the big American sports pick their young players. Unlike other industries, where an employee can choose the city where they want to live and the company they want to work for, in a sports draft the employee can only work for the company that chooses them. Still, for a player like Teixeira, the future was bright.

TEIXEIRA: For all intents and purposes I should have been a top-15 pick, right? The Red Sox that year had the ninth pick.

The Red Sox actually had the twelfth overall pick, not the ninth; Teixeira’s recollection seems a bit off. Anyway …

TEIXEIRA: They called me up before the draft and said, “Hey, we want you to take this signing bonus, it was $1.5 million, we’re going to take you, this signing bonus, agree to this pre-draft deal, we’ll draft you and you’ll get started.” Well you’re not allowed to, at least in those days, you weren’t allowed to pre-negotiate a deal when you’re an amateur. And I said “okay, you know what? I’ll roll the dice. If the Red Sox don’t draft me, some other team will draft me and I’ll be fine.” Well, draft day comes. It was going to be the coolest day of my life, the most exciting day of my life. Not only was I not the ninth pick. I dropped to the ninth round.

DUBNER: Wow. So that’s like 270 spots or something, right?

TEIXEIRA: And who drafts me?

DUBNER: Boston Red Sox?

TEIXEIRA: The Boston Red Sox.

Teixeira wound up going the college route, and played baseball at Georgia Tech.

TEIXEIRA: Best three years of my life.

DUBNER: Met your wife there, I understand?

TEIXEIRA: Met my wife there, had a blast, became a better baseball player.

When Teixeira entered the draft this time, he was picked fifth overall, by the Texas Rangers. So what had happened in that first draft? According to Teixeira, here’s what the Red Sox did:

TEIXEIRA: They called every single team in baseball and said “Teixeira is not signing and he’s going to Georgia Tech. Don’t draft him.”

The Red Sox, we should say, have disputed Teixeira’s account, and claim they did nothing wrong. In any case, here’s what Teixeira took away from that incident.

TEIXEIRA: This was the moment that I realized that baseball is a business.

For Domonique Foxworth, the business side of sports became fully manifest during college, at the University of Maryland.

Domonique FOXWORTH: My freshman year in college, we won the A.C.C. championship. We went to the Orange Bowl and lost and then immediately after, my head coach got a $10-million extension. That was when I was like, “Oh, we aren’t a team, we’re a business.” And that was when the light went on for me.

There is perhaps no more confounding labor market in sports than the one whose organizers insist on saying it is not a labor market. I’m talking about big-time American college sports, run by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or N.C.A.A. College sports — especially basketball and football — have also grown massively over the past few decades; they generate about $13 billion a year — nearly as much as the N.F.L But the labor is essentially free. Aside from room and board and some academic scholarships, college athletes receive no compensation. So where is that $13 billion going?

FOXWORTH: So it goes to supporting other sports, it goes to building bigger and better facilities, it goes to paying college presidents and coaches and funding the N.C.A.A. It goes a lot of different places, but it doesn’t go to the people who are the labor on the field.

Just how much is going to the coaches? The Duke economist Charles Clotfelter looked at compensation data for various personnel from 44 public universities that have big football programs. Over the past 30 years, he found that full professors got a salary increase of 43 percent, adjusted for inflation. Not bad. College presidents got an 89 percent increase over that time. Even better. How’d the football coaches do? Over those 30 years, football coaches’ compensation increased more than 1,100 percent, from an average of around $300,000 to more than $3.6 million a year. Back in 1985, football coaches were earning slightly less on average than the college presidents; now they earn about six times as much. Their athletes, meanwhile, are still playing for free. And if you want a career in the N.B.A. or N.F.L., you pretty much have to play at least some college ball, since both leagues have eligibility requirements that forbid athletes from going pro straight out of high school. Domonique Foxworth again:

FOXWORTH: If that was the end of the story, and every player then went on to have N.F.L. careers, it would be unfair, but whatever, you’re not going to lose any sleep for those guys. But the vast majority of the guys — and I have several teammates who, because it is not considered work, they’re not privy to workers’ compensation. They’re not privy to extended health care. So one of my best friends in college, he had aspirations to play professional football. He had three knee surgeries while in college. A few years ago, his doctor told him that he was going to have to have both of his knees replaced by the time he was 50. And he didn’t play professional sports. And there’s nothing that any college football team or governing body is going to do for him in that case. And that to me is tragic, that a lot of people benefited from that.

DUBNER: So the old-fashioned argument for why this was acceptable was that, this is like what economists call a tournament model, right? Whenever you’ve got a lot of people competing for the top of the pyramid, whether it’s show business or sports or whatever, the bottom of the pyramid, there’s lots and lots and lots and lots of people there willing to do whatever it takes for practically no money. It’s this kind of weird unpaid apprenticeship. Some people accept that as okay. Others don’t. But what strikes me that’s especially noteworthy about sports is the degree and magnitude of sacrifice, physical and otherwise, is larger, I would argue, than trying to become an actor, trying to become a writer, and whatnot. So can you just talk about that component and what you think would be a better solution?

FOXWORTH: I think bringing up the tournament model is interesting, because I can understand how some people would look at that and say that it fits here, and that’s why this is fair. But I think as a country, we’ve decided that that wasn’t fair a long time ago. There are plenty of jobs where that’s true, just about every job. It’s like the barista at Starbucks. There are plenty of people out there who are capable of being baristas, and you could probably allow Starbucks to pit them against each other and negotiate down, down, down, down, down.

But that’s not the case. We’ve instituted minimum wages and instituted lots of other laws to protect American people or American workers from these type of capitalistic urges run amok. And the thing that’s frustrating to me is, we’ve instituted rules in professional sports, that happen to take place on college campuses. We instituted rules that are to the advantages of the institutions. But we are not interested in instituting any rules that are things that we accept as just kind of, facts and fair. You’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone in our society that’s like, “No, let’s eliminate the minimum wage and allow this tournament model to run amok for low-wage workers.”

DUBNER: Well, the other argument though, in colleges, is wait a minute: free education, four years of college, what’s that worth?

FOXWORTH: It could be worth a lot, but you’re not even getting the same education as the people around you. Because you have to travel on Thursdays and Fridays, and you are not allowed to do certain majors because they conflict with your schedule. I wanted to be a computer-science major, and my academic adviser was like, “That course load is going to make it very difficult for you to make our practices, there are labs.” And blah, blah, blah, blah. And three times a week, during the winter session or the spring session, you have to go to 5 a.m. workouts, and that changes your academic experience. There are all these things that are mandatory because your scholarship is year-to-year, and you don’t have any power to negotiate with your coach and say things like, “I want to take this so I’m not going to able to go there.” That’s just not a thing that is available. So the education that they’re receiving is not the education that people think it is.

The Duke economist Charles Clotfelter also looked at graduation rates from 58 universities that have big-time sports programs. For the general population at these schools, the graduation rate was 72 percent. For football players, it was 56 percent; for basketball players, just 42 percent. This is yet another reason that makes some people question the very existence of the N.C.A.A. Here’s the assessment of the entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks.

Mark CUBAN: I think it’s worthless.

DUBNER: If you could blow it up entirely what would you do? Would you have football attached to college at all?

CUBAN: I don’t mind having it attached to college, but I would make it an independent entity so that it would operate independently. Let them go get a job, let them practice as much as they need to. If I wanted to create a band I can pay them, and they can stay in school. They can practice together as much as they want. That’s the hypocrisy. If you want to be a professional athlete, you can’t practice your craft as much as you would like. There’s limits to coaching and playing with your teammates. There’s limits on jobs you can take. There’s so many different things that are bound in stone that it just doesn’t make sense.

For years, there’s been talk about reforming the N.C.A.A., but it hasn’t changed much. The Commission on College Basketball, chaired by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is advocating some reforms that can be seen as pro-athlete. But she also said this: “Our focus has been to strengthen the collegiate model — not to move toward one that brings aspects of professionalism into the game.” Which might make more sense if some aspects of college sports weren’t already at the professional level. Like coaching salaries, and TV audiences, and the expectations of the top-tier athletes. So: how likely is a substantial change? Domonique Foxworth is not optimistic.

FOXWORTH: Those guys who are on the doorsteps of having professional careers, it’s not really in their best interest to stop this now. And the people who are benefiting most from it who are not on the field, there’s really no benefit to the coaches — because coaches’ salaries are inflated because they have extra money, because they are not sending it to the players. And the rest of the teams who are funded by money generated by football and basketball. There’s no incentive there, there’s just the athletes, who don’t have much power.

Foxworth, as you’ve probably figured out by now, has thought through the entire athletic ecosystem more than most people. Besides playing in the N.F.L., he’s been an executive at both the N.F.L. and N.B.A. players’ unions, and he also got an MBA from Harvard. So to understand the incentives he’s been describing, and the transition from college to pro, let’s go back to Foxworth’s own transition.

DUBNER: You were drafted, I believe, 2005, third round. So what I’m looking at here, I have no idea if this is accurate, you were paid for that year, including a signing bonus about $660,000 — that sound about right for year one?

FOXWORTH: Sure.

DUBNER: Okay. And it was a three-year rookie contract. Is that right?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, it was a three-year rookie contract, with the fourth-year option, I believe.

DUBNER: Okay, so looks like your first three years paid you a total of about $1.5 million. And then in your fourth year, then you did become a free agent, moved to Atlanta; those first few years were in Denver.

FOXWORTH: So they traded me. So I went through the first three years, and then I was coming up on a contract year and I played pretty well in Denver, and I knew that I needed to play well in this year because if you don’t, then the salary minimum goes up for guys after that point. So then they just go get a younger one, and you — and you go on with the rest of your life. So during week one, we’re getting ready for the first week of the season in Denver, they traded me to Atlanta. Atlanta was a terrible football team at that point. That was the first time when I considered going to business school. I skipped training camp. “This team is going to be terrible. I’m not going to play. And then I’ll be out of the league.”

DUBNER: But you must have a pretty good year, because the next year you signed a contract with Baltimore that paid you in year one, $8 million, year two, $9.2, and year three, $4.4 — does that sound about right?

FOXWORTH: Yeah, it was a four-year, 27, I think. In Baltimore.

DUBNER: How much of that did you actually collect?

FOXWORTH: All of it.

DUBNER: How — did you have it guaranteed even though you didn’t end up playing out the whole contract?

FOXWORTH: I was on the team for three years, and then the fourth year I had taken out an insurance policy. So I got the rest of it there. So I was fortunate that the knee injury happened after I signed that deal, because if it would have happened when I was in college, or happened a year earlier, I would have been on an entirely different path.

So despite an injury that prematurely ended his career, things worked out pretty well for Foxworth. Meaning: he got paid. By the time he was 30, he was set for life — financially, at least. But consider how easily it might have been different. Consider the case of Andre Ingram.

INGRAM: Hey Steve, how are you doing, man?

Ingram spent 10 seasons in the N.B.A.’s minor leagues — today it’s called the G-League, after its sponsor, Gatorade; it used to be the D-League, for “development.”

INGRAM: So I would tell people that yeah I played in the D League and have been playing for years. They usually notice my gray hair and wonder if I’m a coach or whatnot. At some point, they always ask, “Oh, have you ever made the big time?” And I had to tell them the same thing every time: “Well, not yet.”

That finally changed last year. Ingram, at 32 years of age, was promoted to the Los Angeles Lakers for the season’s last two games. Here’s what happened on the first shot he took in the N.B.A.:

ANNOUNCER: Down it goes! Welcome to the N.B.A., Andre Ingram!

ANNOUNCER: Makes his first try! That is awesome!

Ingram went on to score 19 points that night.

INGRAM: My brother and my niece had called told me — they said, “Hey, you are blowing up on Twitter, you’re blowing up on Instagram, you’re everywhere.”

Ingram made a great impression. But still: he was a 32-year-old rookie. Would the Lakers bring him back the following season? When we spoke with Ingram, this past summer, the Lakers had just made news by signing the much-coveted LeBron James to a four-year, $153-million deal. How would Ingram feel about sharing the court with the best player of his generation?

INGRAM: Yeah, I mean, count me along with the hundred percent of players who would love to play with LeBron. So I mean, that’s a no-brainer. You won’t believe how many texts I got when he made the decision. So a lot of people are already assuming that I was going to be back with the Lakers and they were like, “Man, you get to play with LeBron.” In my head I’m like, “Man, I hope so.”

DUBNER: Either that or if he took your roster spot, that’s the the bad way of looking at it.

INGRAM: You know what, some people text me that as well.

Unfortunately for Ingram, the Los Angeles Lakers did not bring him back. He’s playing for the South Bay Lakers of the G-League this year, his 11th season in the minors. And he’s not doing so well, averaging less than 8 points a game, with a career low in three-point shooting, his specialty. Which means that for Andre Ingram, the end of his professional career is probably pretty close.

INGRAM: I don’t sit around complaining about it, thinking it’s unfair. I just would want for people in general who watch basketball and know the game to just know that there are guys out there in the G-League now, and overseas and elsewhere, who just know how to play the game of basketball and can play it in the highest of level, including the N.B.A.

* * *

It’s easy to see professional athletes as fortunate beyond belief — getting rich for playing the game they love, yada yada. But that, as we’ve been learning today, is a very simplistic view of a complicated economic ecosystem. For one thing, it’s easy to focus on the handful of athletes at the very tippy-top of the pyramid, at the exclusion of the thousands of athletes below them.

JOHNSON: You don’t make money unless you succeed at the Olympics.

That’s Shawn Johnson. She won one gold and three silver medals in gymnastics at the 2008 Olympics.

JOHNSON: How the majority of Olympic endorsements work is, you sign an Olympic endorsement, such as a Coca-Cola, a McDonald’s, Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, before the Olympics even start. But the way these contracts are structured is these athletes aren’t paid any money upfront. The only way they earn money is by winning medals. So if you sign a deal with Nike that’s, say a million dollars, you go to the Olympics and you don’t win a medal, you don’t earn any money. And when you’re talking about thousands and thousands of athletes who have reached the pinnacle of their sport by just qualifying to the Olympics, the fact that they aren’t getting compensated for their journey that’s gotten them to that point, I think is pretty extreme.

Extreme, perhaps. But also very similar to another population of amateur athletes — all the college football and basketball players who are very, very good but not quite good enough to have a pro career. And if you are that good, and lucky? Then you’re drafted by a pro team — remember, they choose you; you don’t choose them. And now you’re looking at a rookie contract, with pre-determined wages for your first several years. If you last that long. If not, the team can cut you loose. Which means your downside is unprotected at the same time that your upside is limited.

MATHESON: You’re basically stuck at a way-below-market paycheck for your first three years at a minimum.

That’s Victor Matheson, an economist at College of the Holy Cross and president of the North American Association of Sports Economists.

MATHESON: Is that made up for by the fact that you get to make these huge free-agent contracts later? Yeah, but only if you last long enough to actually make it to free agency.

Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback, did make it that far — actually, he did so well in his first three seasons that Seattle gave him a contract extension worth nearly $90 million before what would have been his final season under his rookie contract. But during those first three seasons, he averaged under $1 million a year despite leading his team to two Super Bowls and winning one. And what if Wilson instead had played Major League Baseball — which he maybe could have; he was drafted by the Colorado Rockies and played some minor-league ball. In baseball, Wilson would have had to put in six years of major league service to become a free agent. Interestingly, the average career length in Major League Baseball is 5.6 years. Also interesting: rookie N.F.L. contracts are for four years, and the average N.F.L. career length?

MATHESON: The typical player plays about three seasons.

This presents a paradox. A clash of incentives that gives the leagues and teams much more leverage than the athletes. As Victor Matheson sees it, this also helps explain why a players’ strike would be very hard to organize.

MATHESON: If I’m working for Verizon on the lines fixing telephone poles, I might be willing to sit out and lose my salary for an entire year if I can get a 10 percent higher salary for the next 20 years I’m working for them. Those numbers kind of work out. But if you’re a Major League Baseball player, if you’re an N.F.L. player, you can’t afford to lose even one season because there’s almost no increase in pay that could possibly justify you losing one season of your very, very short career. And the owners have a huge advantage over them.

FOXWORTH: They will not make that money back. It’s just physically impossible.

Domonique Foxworth again. He was on the N.F.L. players’ union executive committee during its last collective bargaining negotiation, in 2011.

FOXWORTH: With the length of a player’s career, and how much money they could stand to make in a season, it’s really not in their best interest. Mathematically, logically, if you go through the numbers, it’s not in their best interest to actually withstand a lockout or to initiate a strike.

MATHESON: And as a matter of fact, teams themselves have stopped striking completely. All of the last major interruptions in pro sports in the United States have not been strikes, although they look like that to a fan. They’ve been lockouts. Yeah, this is the owners actually going on strike and not paying the players rather than the players refusing to work.

That’s what happened in the 2011 N.F.L. negotiations. The N.F.L. locked out the players for 132 days — although it was during the off-season, so it barely affected the run of play. The owners and the players’ union finally agreed on a 10-year deal, which saw the players’ share of revenue fall from essentially 50-50 to somewhere in the high 40s — although the players did gain some other concessions, like funding for retirement and fewer practices. The most recent N.B.A. and N.H.L. collective bargaining agreements have, similarly, resulted in a smaller share of revenue going to the athletes. That said, those are huge, rich leagues that generate many millions of dollars for even average players. It can be a lot harder to make a living in some other pro sports.

MURPHY: Yeah it’s a pretty typical fighter story to be broke and trying to make it.

Lauren Murphy started fighting in mixed-martial arts matches in 2010; she’s currently a top-ranked flyweight fighter in the U.F.C., or Ultimate Fighting Championship.

MURPHY: There was a time when I was coming up, before I was signed to the U.F.C., where I was traveling a lot to train. I was sleeping on people’s floors. I was sleeping in their guest bedrooms. I would housesit and dogsit for people at the gym. It’s hard to come up in fighting because you spend all your time training so you don’t have a lot of time to work.

MATHESON: If you’re trying to decide what sport to go into man, stay away from U.F.C. because they’re making a lot of revenues but not much of that is going into the athletes.

In the big team sports, Matheson told us, roughly half of the revenues are designated for the players — although, as we just noted, that share has been shrinking a bit. In the U.F.C., meanwhile, that share is much lower.

MATHESON: The amount going to the athletes there is about 10 or 15 percent of revenues.

The chief operating officer of the U.F.C., Lawrence Epstein, disputes that figure.

EPSTEIN: The 15 percent number, I don’t — I don’t think that’s accurate. I mean there certainly is some fluctuation in the percentage of revenue that goes to athletes. But the reason for that primarily is that we have a variable- revenue-stream model in our company.

Meaning: the U.F.C. distributes some of its fights via pay-per-view, whereas the big team sports have bigger, more reliable TV contracts. Still, salary data for U.F.C. athletes is hard to come by, since the company is privately held and the athletes are not unionized, which means there’s no collective bargaining agreement.

MURPHY: The U.F.C. really has all the control. They can cut you on one loss. They can cut you after two losses. They can keep you around for as many fights as they want. They can renegotiate your contract. There’s just — they have a lot of power.

That said, Lauren Murphy is not much of a critic of the U.F.C. Her career may not be all that lucrative but it is a career. Maybe more important, it’s given shape to her life; sports — in Murphy’s case, fighting — it can have that effect on people. And that’s part of the draw.

MURPHY: I struggled with depression and I struggled with addiction and I kind of just became your typical high-school dropout/teenage mom in a small town. And it’s just changed my life in ways that I never could have even dreamed of back then in a small town in Alaska.

In just her third U.F.C. fight, Murphy earned a $50,000 bonus for taking part in the Fight of the Night — a fairly subjective award bestowed by U.F.C. management to the two fighters who deliver the most impressive performance on a given night’s card.

MURPHY: That bonus changed my life. I paid off a bunch of student loans with that. And I got out of debt and it was really a life-changing experience for me.

Murphy’s bonus was a great stroke of fortune. As for her guaranteed pay in the U.F.C.? That’s a different story. Fighters get paid for two things: making weight and winning. The figures vary but the most Murphy’s ever gotten was 12 and 12— $12,000 for making weight and $12,000 for a win — which, obviously, is also not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is that Murphy will train five to six hours a day for months and that U.F.C. fighters get, on average, just 2.3 matches per year.

MURPHY: I’ve only made about $15,000 in the U.F.C. so far this year. But you, know my dream was to see how far I could take this. And for me, at least, if I wanted to be in a profession to make a sh— load of money, I would have been a lawyer or something — a doctor or something like that. I mean yes, I’d like to make more. I think anybody on earth wants to make more. If you ask them, “Do you want to make more money?” everybody’s going to be like, “Yes.” So I would love to make more money. I certainly think I’m worth more money.

MATHESON: It might have more to do with the fact that this is a fairly new sport that may be still trying to find its way.

Victor Matheson again.

MATHESON: But that’s that’s way less than you’re making elsewhere.

DUBNER: Now do you anticipate that changing, if we were to talk in five or 10 years? U.F.C. is making a lot of money and they’ve been growing really fast. Do you think that the athletes will eventually get the leverage to get that share up to 30, 50, 60 percent of revenues?

MATHESON: Well, we did not see that happen in any of the other individual sports until we had those athletes joined together in some sort of important way.

The athletes’ unions — or players’ associations, as they’re often called —negotiate not only pay scales but also work conditions, schedules, health and safety, and various benefits. In other words, they do what labor unions have always done. The N.F.L. Players Association is, in fact, a member of the AFL-CIO, the big federation of unions that include the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Here, again, is DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the N.F.L. Players Association.

SMITH: I think it would be fair to say, and people should understand, that we are labor. And the National Football League and its member teams are our management. And there is no difference in the hostility between us than there would be between management writ large and labor writ large in America. We literally have engaged in hundreds of legal fights with the league and the teams in the 10 years since I’ve been here.

Smith, we should say, is a lawyer who’s worked in private practice as well as at the U.S. Department of Justice.

SMITH: The history of labor and management in the United States has been one for the most part where management has successfully lobbied and changed laws through litigation that have affected a net negative for employees. So we don’t necessarily shy away from making sure that we are aggressive in the way in which we protect our players’ interest. Whether it’s issues of health care, issues of control, issues of free speech, issues of injury care, issues over money, shares of revenue. The league locked us out in 2011, and that means not only cutting off the players’ right to earn a living but they cut off the health insurance for thousands of players’ wives and dozens of players’ wives who were expecting children during the lockout. They’ve issued and engaged in legislative action to take away our players’ right to medical care and certainly we’ve had our skirmishes over commissioner discipline and revenue.

DUBNER: Now as I understand it, some team owners are supporting legislation in a handful of states that would take away worker’s comp from injured players. Do I have that right?

SMITH: Yeah, we’ve probably had somewhere between 10 and 15 state legislature fights with bills supported by team owners to take workers’ comp away from professional athletes, which is terrible.

DUBNER: And their argument then is what? That it shouldn’t be —

SMITH: Their argument is that they are cheap.

DUBNER: And tell me about some of the other legal challenges you’ve filed whether against the league or legislatures whether it has to do with healthcare, revenue share, or whatnot.

SMITH: This show is no way long enough to go down that road.

Considering all the issues that N.F.L. players face — and considering that they play in the richest sports league in the history of the world and have a relatively strong union — you might think athletes in lesser sports would like to emulate them. But not necessarily …

MURPHY: I’ve been contacted a couple times now by people that want to unionize and I just have a really hard time getting on board with it.

That again is U.F.C. fighter Lauren Murphy.

MURPHY: I mean, I would love to see fighters get signed to the U.F.C. and right off the bat they’re making way more money — enough to live off of for an entire year. I think that would be great, but I don’t know if it’s feasible. I don’t know what the U.F.C.’s finances are or how the budgets work out or how any of that works.

Part of that mystery is intentional — the U.F.C., as we mentioned, is privately owned. An investor group led by the WME-IMG agency bought it in 2016 for about $4 billion.

MURPHY: If we unionize, and suddenly WME-IMG says, “OK, well this isn’t what we anticipated when we bought the U.F.C. so we’re going to have to cut out a bunch of divisions so that we can afford to pay the fighters that we have left.” And they get rid of the less popular divisions, say. And now you’re getting rid of the fringe weight classes and the women’s weight classes and stuff like that. Well, now I’ve gone from maybe making a smaller portion of the pie to making nothing.

Murphy’s situation highlights one of the common problems for any sort of collective action, whether in sports labor or anywhere. The people with the most to gain — the Lauren Murphys of the world — usually don’t have much leverage; they can just be replaced. The superstars, meanwhile, do have leverage but often have little incentive to push for collective action. One exception was the tennis champion Billie Jean King, who in 1973 threatened to boycott the U.S. Open unless it awarded equal prize money for women and men. The U.S. Tennis Association met her demands. King also helped found the Women’s Tennis Association, which pushed for equal prize money in all the major tournaments, and has helped turn tennis into one of the few sports in which the women’s competition is arguably as high-profile as the men’s. There’s a movement currently underway in beach volleyball to gain more leverage for the athletes, again with a female superstar leading the charge.

WALSH JENNINGS: For so long, it’s been one top athlete raising their hand saying, “That’s not enough,” and if one top athlete boycotts who cares, and the divide-and-conquer strategy happens all the time.

That, again, is Kerri Walsh Jennings, one of the most decorated and high-profile players in beach volleyball history.

WALSH JENNINGS: The athletes have no leverage because the athletes aren’t unified and we’ve been told for so long about your sport is small, this is what you deserve this is as good as it gets.

In 2017, Walsh Jennings was part of a group of players that tried to negotiate a new deal with the A.V.P., the Association of Volleyball Professionals, which runs the biggest beach-volleyball tour in the country, with eight events a year. It’s not a big money-maker for the athletes.

WALSH JENNINGS: The top player last year made, I think, just under or just over $38,000. We pay for our training, we pay for our coaches, we pay for travel, we pay for hotel. And that was the top player in the country.

Like many sports leagues and tours, the A.V.P. operates in a way that might make you think “monopoly.”

WALSH JENNINGS: So they own you for 365 days for possibly eight days of work that you’re probably not even — you maybe if you lose your first two, you’re maybe making 500 bucks. And it’s just the athletes are being held hostage. Basically a gun was held to the players’ head, saying, “If you don’t sign this, we’re going to fold the tour.” There was no other alternative. We got calls the night before the deadline. Girls crying, saying, “Kerri, we want to sit with you and fight with you but I can’t pay rent unless I play in this tournament next week.”

In the end, Walsh Jennings refused to sign the contract but she’s sympathetic to the players who did sign.

WALSH JENNINGS: Oh, for sure. And I understand they had no other choice. And some people never agreed with us. They’re like “I believe this is it, and we should be grateful that A.V.P. is giving us these limited opportunities.” I was like, “That’s totally fine.” I’m the C.E.O. of my life. I do not want to give the reins to my life and my success to someone else’s hands and I do not want to be kept small.

As one of the stars of her sport, Walsh Jennings had the leverage to walk away. To her, it wasn’t just about the money; she feels the A.V.P. doesn’t have a vision for growing the sport in a way that will benefit the athletes.

WALSH JENNINGS: I went in October or November of 2016 and said “Can you please lay out the next four years? We have this contract coming up. Please give me your plans for growth for all these things.” There were zero plans for growth. They were going to go away from TV. It was going to be an exclusive contract for eight events, maybe up to 10 by 2020. They would not increase the prize money. That wasn’t in their business model, they said.

So she’s started an alternate tour, called p1440 — the “p” is for “platform” and 1440 for the number of minutes in a day; Walsh Jennings wants to push people to use every minute wisely.

WALSH JENNINGS: We knew in creating p1440 that if we were just to be another volleyball property that hosts events, we would not be a sustainable business. And it’s competition, health and wellness, personal development, and entertainment. So we are a festival, we’re not a volleyball tournament; we are a full-blown festival.

One big problem: a lot of the players that Walsh Jennings would like to play in her events are under an exclusive A.V.P. contract.

WALSH JENNINGS: So the A.V.P. has eight events a year. If you want to play anywhere else you have to ask for dispensation and everyone who’s asked for dispensation to play in our events — even though we scheduled around their events, were not conflicting at all, were in their off-season — they’ve been told no.

Walsh Jennings is 40 years old — fairly ancient for a competitive athlete. She’s preparing now for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, which will likely be her last. If nothing else, her new startup league is a great project to be involved in when her playing days are finally over. There’s a famous saying: every athlete dies twice — once when they draw their last breath, the other when they hang it up. There’s a point at which they’ll stop doing what they’ve been doing since they were kids, the thing that’s driven them and, often, given shape to their lives. It’s inevitable; and it’s dreaded, a sort of living afterlife.

REDICK: I think about the end, meaning the specific moment that it ends. I think about the moment I tell my wife. I think about the moment I tell my family. I think about those moments.

That’s J.J. Redick, who’s playing in his 13th season in the N.B.A., currently with the Philadelphia 76ers.

REDICK: And it’s anxiety-inducing, it’s — sometimes I actually if I’m having a dark moment and I think of that moment, I cry like. I think about what I’m going to do after basketball on a daily basis. And there’s a level of fear of the other side. And my — I hate to say this but so much of my identity and any professional athlete is wrapped up in your sport. Since I was eight or nine years old I’ve been a basketball player, it’s what I’ve done.

MURPHY: I think that’s a question that a lot of fighters really struggle with.

Lauren Murphy of the U.F.C. is 35 years old.

MURPHY: Fighting kind of becomes your whole identity, and because it takes so much of our time it’s our entire lives. It can be hard to move on.

This entwined identity — personal and professional — is something that Sudhir Venkatesh has been studying for years.

Sudhir VENKATESH: I’m a professor of sociology at Columbia University in New York.

Venkatesh tries to understand how individuals operate within groups — in all sorts of settings.

VENKATESH: Yeah, my method is to spend as much time with groups, tribes, people, get to know their world a little bit. I started with street gangs, boy — a long time ago, about 30 years ago. Gun traffickers and prostitutes, people who are doing all sorts of illegal things, And since then I spent a couple of years at the F.B.I. And that’s my chosen profession in life, spend as much time with people and get their story.

He’s had a lot of success getting their stories. But professional athletes are particularly tricky.

VENKATESH: It’s a little difficult for me to just show up on the sideline and put a hoodie on and pretend that I’m a member of the team. So I have to create opportunities to observe.

One such opportunity came via a program he developed to teach athletes, often toward the end of their careers, about business skills or philanthropy. This let him see, up close, how they were adjusting to the afterlife.

VENKATESH: Well, the life of an athlete, from very early in their career is dominated and regimented by people other than themselves.

This kind of all-encompassing, controlled setting has a name in sociology — it’s called a total institution.

VENKATESH: An example of a total institution would be prison. So your day is structured from the moment you get up, they tell you where to go, what to eat, when to eat, when to shower, and so on.

Venkatesh was interested to see how athletes, having spent so much time in a total institution, could adjust to a more fluid setting like an office. He found there were some surprising advantages.

VENKATESH: A lot of professional athletes, I find, handle interpersonal conflict very well, and they are used to it. They are used to being told that they didn’t perform well, they need to perform better, they need to work better in a team, they need to listen better. All the sorts of things that many of us, including me, are very fearful of in an office setting — we’re going to get reviewed, we’re going to get assessed, it’s often done by email late at night. And these folks are really, really good just having someone walk up to them or going up to somebody and not having it out, but just getting past whatever’s in-between and blocking them.

But this upside, Venkatesh discovered, has a downside: most of us non-former athletes aren’t accustomed to having someone get in our face like that! Venkatesh recalls one former football player — he calls him Derrick — who was working in sales at an investment firm.

VENKATESH: He noticed that on the floor, there were no open spaces. He was used to locker rooms — he was used to not having a lot of privacy. And it was difficult for him to work in a team setting when what he was supposed to do was to use telecommunications or e-mail to make appointments or to reach out. And instead he would just be going down, knocking on doors really hard, going to offices, crossing the boundaries. And people just got really scared because here’s this very big guy coming at them. And for Derrick there it was actually the opposite, that when people were closing doors or people were sending him e-mails, he felt like that was impersonal. That was not polite. That was not effective. “Why don’t we just solve the problem immediately and move forward?” So he had to go through a little bit of training. And you can imagine that that’s not part of the normal onboarding that that a company might do.

Transitioning to this living afterlife can present all sorts of challenges. Studies of former N.F.L. and N.B.A. players — even the ones who’ve made a lot of money — show they are grotesquely prone to bankruptcy. And remember: these are the lucky ones who made it. But the demands of their profession can make it really hard to have time to acquire real-world skills. There’s also the long-term health consequences of playing competitive sports: a recent study of athletes from Indiana University found that, by middle age, they were twice as likely as non-athletes to have health problems, including chronic injuries, that affected their day-to-day activities. But even if you make it into middle age with your health, and with your finances intact — there’s still the risk of a full-blown existential crisis.

FOXWORTH: I mean, most people’s journeys are so much longer that when they do succeed, they die a few years after or something. You know?

Domonique Foxworth again.

FOXWORTH: It’s an interesting thing to happen to somebody at this age. It feels like more of a midlife thing. And for athletes it’s a unique thing. Successful athletes, it’s a unique thing, that in your 20s or 30s you’re like, “Now what?”

Part of it is missing the action. Lauren Murphy thinks about the people she trains with.

MURPHY: I was surrounded by a team and I had never experienced anything like that before in my life. We all had this thing in common where we wanted to compete and we all wanted to do well and we supported each other in that. And when you bleed and sweat and cry with somebody every day, you get to be pretty close to them.

There’s also the fear that you’ll never be this good at anything again. Or as relevant. J.J. Redick:

REDICK: Look, the reality is you have a lot more power, a lot more juice, a lot more relevancy when it says your name and it says active N.B.A. player versus your name, retired N.B.A. player. So me as a person, nothing will have changed five years from now. But I won’t have active N.B.A. player next to my name. The thought that crosses your mind is like, “I’m really good at basketball. I’ve done it at a high level for a long time and I’ve had success and it’s provided me a very nice living.” And then you’re like, “What if I try something else and I’m just awful at it?” I feel like I’m as prepared as anyone for the other side of it and it still scares me.

Domonique Foxworth thought he was pretty prepared too. He and his wife had a couple kids. He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do — other than keep winning.

FOXWORTH: I went to business school because I was like, “Alright, now I’m going to keep competing.” I’ll go to the best business school and then I got there. And I was surprised with how much mushy, soft classes that we had. That was about our feelings and integrity and all that stuff. And I do remember one of the professors said that — it wasn’t to me directly, it was just to the class, but it felt like he was talking to me directly. But he said something to the effect of, the operating system that you used to get here may not be the operating system that you need going forward. And that resonated with me, because I feel like that’s definitely true for me. But I don’t know, they don’t just like release updates for humans. So modifying my operating system is a slower, more challenging process.

Foxworth thought he’d like being chief operating officer of the N.B.A. players’ union, in New York.

FOXWORTH: My wife was pregnant with our third child, and she was not feeling good, and I was getting up at 6:30 a.m. to ride the subway to work with a bunch of other people who weren’t happy about where they were going to work. And I remember thinking like, “Am I happy? I have enough money that I don’t have to be unhappy.”

For fun, he started writing — about sports. Now he writes and does broadcasting for a variety of ESPN outlets.

FOXWORTH: I went to business school in part because I fancy myself as a smart person who is more than an athlete. And so there’s parts of me that’s embarrassed that I write about sports. Talk about sports. But then there’s parts of me that’s like, “This is awesome.” I get to pick up my kids from school and take them to school. It’s not that like “Oh, my life is boring.” It’s like, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the best thing I can with this fortunate situation that I’m in?” What also exacerbates it, I think, is a feeling of loneliness, honestly, which — and it’s not like — I have three kids and my wife, and I’m not alone, obviously. And I love them and I have fun with them.

But throughout my life, I have been almost myopically focused on a goal, which — being focused on that goal gave me purpose and I’m sure I’m going to butcher the Nietzsche quote, but it’s something to the effect of, “When a man has a why, he can bear almost any how.” And I was — I don’t drink now, I never drank in my life. I never smoke weed. I was singularly focused on doing everything. Every decision I made was like, “Alright, I’m going to get closer to this goal.” The people I was close with in high school, those aren’t my friends anymore. People I was close with in college, not really my friends anymore. And then at 35, I’m in D.C., where my wife has a bunch of family and friends, friends that she’s been close with since they were in the second grade, and I’m like, “I don’t really have that.” So I certainly don’t feel sad or anything, but these are things that I am becoming more aware of now. I feel I’m in a, a perpetual state of transition, which is interesting and uncomfortable at the same time.

Thanks to Domonique Foxworth and all the other athletes we heard from today and throughout our “Hidden Side of Sports” series — also the team and league officials, scholars, and everyone else. If you want to hear my full conversation with Foxworth — it was a long one, and fascinating — we’ll be publishing that soon.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Anders Kelto, Derek John, Alvin Melathe, and Alison Craiglow with help from Matt Stroup and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Greg Rippin and Zack Lapinski. We had help this week from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Mark Cuban, owner of the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks.

Domonique Foxworth, retired N.F.L. cornerback.

Andre Ingram, N.B.A. G-League player for the South Bay Lakers.

Shawn Johnson, gymnast and American Olympian.

Victor Matheson, economist at College of the Holy Cross.

Lauren Murphy, U.F.C. fighter.

J.J. Redick, N.B.A. player for the Philadelphia 76ers.

DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the N.F.L. players’ union.

Mark Teixeira, ESPN analyst.

Sudhir Venkatesh, sociologist at Columbia University.

Kerri Walsh Jennings, professional beach volleyball player and American Olympian.

RESOURCES

Big-Time Sports in American Universities by Charles Clotfelter (Cambridge University Press 2011).

The Economics of Sports, Sixth Edition by Michael Leeds, Peter von Allmen, and Victor Matheson (Routledge, 2018).

EXTRA

“How Sports Became Us (Ep. 349),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“How to Stop Being a Loser (Ep. 350),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Here’s Why You’re Not an Elite Athlete (Ep. 351),” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Think Like a Winner (Ep. 363),” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

“Inside the Sports-Industrial Complex (Ep. 364),” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

The post Not Just Another Labor Force (Ep. 365) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/sports-6/

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How the middle class hoards wealth and opportunity for itself

American society is dominated by an elite 20% that ruthlessly protects its own interests

When I was growing up, my mother would sometimes threaten my brother and me with electrocution. Well, thats not quite right. In fact, the threat was of lessons in elocution, but we wittily, we thought renamed them.

Growing up in a very ordinary town just north of London and attending a very ordinary high school, one of our several linguistic atrocities was failing to pronounce the t in certain words. My mother, who was raised in rural north Wales and left school at 16, did not want us to find doors closed in a class-sensitive society simply because we didnt speak what is still called the Queens English. I will never forget the look on her face when I managed to say the word computer with neither a p nor a t.

Still, the lessons never materialised. Any lingering working-class traces in my own accent were wiped away by three disinfectant years at Oxford University. (My wife claims the adolescent accent resurfaces when I drink, but she doesnt know what shes talking about shes American.) We also had to learn how to waltz. My mother didnt want us to put a foot wrong there either.

In fact, we did just fine, in no small part because of the stable, loving home in which we were raised. But I have always been acutely sensitive to class distinctions and their role in perpetuating inequality. In fact, one of the reasons I came to the United States was to escape the cramped feeling of living in a nation still so dominated by class. I knew enough not to think I was moving to a socially mobile utopia: Id read some of the research. It has nonetheless come as something of a shock to discover that, in some important respects, the American class system is functioning more ruthlessly than the British one I escaped.

In the upper-middle-class America I now inhabit, I witness extraordinary efforts by parents to secure an elite future status for their children: tutors, coaches and weekend lessons in everything from French to fencing. But I have never heard any of my peers try to change the way their children speak. Perhaps this is simply because they know they are surrounded by other upper-middle-class kids, so there is nothing to worry about. Perhaps it is a regional thing.

But I think there is a better explanation. Americans tend to think their children will be judged by their accomplishments rather than their accents. Class position is earned, rather than simply expressed. The way to secure a higher status in a market meritocracy is by acquiring lots of merit and ensuring that our kids do, too. What ones parents are like is entirely a matter of luck, points out the philosopher Adam Swift. But he adds: What ones children are like is not. Children raised in upper-middle-class families do well in life. As a result, there is a lot of intergenerational stickiness at the top of the American income distribution more, in fact, than at the bottom with upper-middle-class status passed from one generation to the next.

Drawing class distinctions feels almost un-American. The nations self-image is of a classless society, one in which every individual is of equal moral worth, regardless of his or her economic status. This has been how the world sees the United States, too. Historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the early 19th century that Americans were seen to be more equal in fortune and intelligence more equally strong, in other words than they were in any other country, or were at any other time in recorded history. So different to the countries of old Europe, still weighed down by the legacies of feudalism.

British politicians have often felt the need to urge the creation of a classless society, looking to America for inspiration as, what historian David Cannadine once called it, the pioneering and prototypical classless society. European progressives have long looked enviously at social relations in the New World. George Orwell noted the lack of servile tradition in America; the German socialist Werner Sombart noticed that the bowing and scraping before the upper classes, which produces such an unpleasant impression in Europe, is completely unknown.

This is one of many reasons socialist politics struggled to take root in the United States. A key attraction of socialist systems the main one, according to Orwell is the eradication of class distinctions. There were few to eradicate in America. I am sure that one reason Downton Abbey and The Crown so delight American audiences is their depictions of an alien world of class-based status. One reason class distinctions are less obvious in America is that pretty much everyone defines themselves as a member of the same class: the one in the middle. Nine in ten adults select the label middle class, exactly the same proportion as in 1939, according to the pollsters Gallup. No wonder that politicians have always fallen over each other to be on their side.

But in recent decades Americans at the top of the ladder have been entrenching their class position. The convenient fiction that the middle class can stretch up that far has become a difficult one to sustain. As a result, the modifications upper or lower to the general middle class category have become more important.

Class is not just about money, though it is about that. The class gap can be seen from every angle: education, security, family, health, you name it. There will also be inequalities on each of these dimensions, of course. But inequality becomes class division when all these varied elements money, education, wealth, occupation cluster together so tightly that, in practice, almost any one of them will suffice for the purposes of class definition. Class division becomes class stratification when these advantages and thus status endure across generations. In fact, upper-middle-class status is passed down to the next generation more effectively than in the past, and in the United States more than in other countries.

One benefit of the multidimensional nature of this separation is that it has reduced interdisciplinary bickering over how to define class. While economists typically focus on categorisation by income and wealth, and sociologists tend more towards occupational status and education, and anthropologists are typically more interested in culture and norms, right now it doesnt really matter, because all the trends are going the same way.

It is not just the top 1% pulling away, but the top 20%. In fact, only a very small proportion of US adults 1% to 2% define themselves as upper class. A significant minority about one in seven adopts the upper middle class description. This is quite similar to the estimates of class size generated by most sociologists, who tend to define the upper middle class as one composed of professionals and managers, or around 15% to 20% of the working-age population.

As David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation writes: There is little appetite in America for policies that significantly restrict the ability of parents to do all they can, within the bounds of the law, to give their children every advantage in life. That is certainly true. But then Azerrad has also mis-stated the problem. No one sensible is in favour of new policies that block parents from doing the best they can for their children. Even in France the suggestion floated by the former president, Franois Hollande, to restore equality by banning homework, on the grounds that parents differ in their ability and willingness to help out, was laughed out of court. But we should want to get rid of policies that allow parents to give their children an unfair advantage and in the process restrict the opportunities of others.

Most of us want to do our best for our children. Wanting ones childrens life to go well is part of what it means to love them, write philosophers Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift in their 2014 book Family Values: The Ethics of Parent-Child Relationships. But our natural preference for the welfare and prospects of our own children does not automatically eclipse other moral claims. We would look kindly on a father who helps his son get picked as starting pitcher for his school baseball team by practising with him every day after work. But we would probably feel differently about a father who secures the slot for his son by bribing the coach. Why? After all, each father has sacrificed something, time in one case, money in the other, to advance his child. The difference is team selection should be based on merit, not money. A principle of fairness is at stake.

So, where is the line drawn? The best philosophical treatment of this question I have found is the one by Swift and Brighouse. Their suggestion is that, while parents have every right to act in ways that will help their childrens lives go well, they do not have the right to confer on them a competitive advantage in other words, to ensure not just that they do well but that they do better than others. This is because, in a society with finite rewards, improving the situation of one child necessarily worsens that of another, at least in relative terms: Whatever parents do to confer competitive advantage is not neutral in its effects on other children it does not leave untouched, but rather is detrimental to, those other childrens prospects in the competition for jobs and associated rewards.

The trouble is that in the real world this seems like a distinction without a difference. What they call competitive advantage-conferring parental activities will almost always be also helping-your-kid-flourish parental activities. If I read bedtime stories to my son, he will develop a richer vocabulary and may learn to love reading and have a more interesting and fulfilling life. But it could also help him get better grades than his classmates, giving him a competitive advantage in college admissions. Swift and Brighouse suggest a parent should not even aim to give their child a competitive advantage: It would be a little odd, perhaps even a little creepy, if the ultimate aim of her endeavours were that her child is better off than others.

I think this is too harsh. In a society with a largely open, competitive labour market, it is not creepy to want your children to end up higher on the earnings ladder than others. Not only will this bring them a higher income, and all the accompanying choices and security, it is also likely to bring them safer and more interesting work. Relative position matters it is one reason, after all, that relative mobility is of such concern to policymakers. Although I think Brighouse and Swift go too far, they are on to something important with their distinction between the kind of parental behaviour that merely helps your own children and the kind that is detrimental to others. Thats what I call opportunity hoarding.

Opportunity hoarding does not result from the workings of a large machine but from the cumulative effect of individual choices and preferences. Taken in isolation, they may feel trivial: nudging your daughter into a better college with a legacy preference [giving applicants places on the basis of being related to alumni of the college]; helping the son of a professional contact to an internship; a single vote on a municipal council to retain low-density zoning restrictions. But, like many micro-preferences, to borrow a term from economist Thomas Schelling, they can have strong effects on overall culture and collective outcomes.

Over recent decades, institutions that once primarily served racist goals legacy admissions to keep out Jewish students, zoning laws to keep out black families have not been abandoned but have been softened, normalised and subtly re-purposed to help us sustain the upper-middle-class status. They remain, then, barriers to a more open, more genuinely competitive and fairer society. I wont insult your intelligence by pretending there are no costs here. By definition, reducing opportunity hoarding will mean some losses for the upper middle class.

But they will be small. Our neighbourhoods will be a little less upmarket but also less boring. Our kids will rub shoulders with some poorer kids in the school corridor. They might not squeak into an Ivy League college, and they may have to be content going to an excellent public university. But if we arent willing to entertain even these sacrifices, there is little hope. There will be some material costs, too. The big challenge is to equalise opportunities to acquire human capital and therefore increase the number of true competitors in the labour market. This will require, among other things, some increased public investment. Where will the money come from? It cant all come from the super-rich. Much of it will have to come from the upper middle class. From me andyou.

This is an extract from Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What To Do About It by Richard V Reeves (Brookings Institution Press, 2017)

HOW TO STAY AHEAD – OR PLAY FAIR

As parents, we naturally want our children to flourish. But that laudable desire slides into opportunity hoarding when we use our money, power or position to give our own children exclusive access to certain goods or chances. The effect is to strengthen class barriers.

1. Fix an internship using our networks. Internships are becoming more important but are too often stitched up privately. Its worse if theyre unpaid. Instead: insist on paid internships, openly recruited.

2. Take our own kids to work for the day. Children learn what work is from adults. Instead: try bringing somebody elses kid to work, perhaps by partnering with local charities.

3. Be a Nimby. By shutting out low-income housing from our neighbourhoods with planning restrictions, we keep less affluent kids away from our local schools and communities. Instead: be a Yimby, vote and argue for more mixed housing in your area.

4. Write cheques to PTA funds. Many of us want to support the school our children attend. This tilts the playing field, however, since other schools cant do the same. Instead: get your PTA to give half the donations to a school in a poor area.