Good Reads: January 14, 2012 Edition

DeParle (NYT): Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

Krugman (NYT): Nobody Understands Debt

Stevenson (Slate): The Greatest Paper Map of US You Will Ever See

Nocera (NYT): The College Sports Cartel (and his follow-up pieces: Let's Start Paying College Athletes, NCAA's 'Justice' System and More NCAA 'Justice')

Over- and Under-Extended Pro-Sports Markets

Arturo Galletti at the Wages of Wins Journal has an interesting analysis of which metro areas are capable of economically handling their pro-sports teams.  He relies on On Numbers' Sports Capacity measure to identify which cities are above and below capacity.  Per their site, On Numbers used, "team revenue data and average ticket prices to calculate the amount of TPI [Total Personal Income] needed to adequately support a team in each league. Minimum income bases were estimated to be $85.4 billion for MLB, $37.6 billion for the NHL, $36.7 billion for the NFL, $34.2 billion for the NBA, and $15.4 billion for MLS."  Without some more details, it is a little difficult to evaluate Galletti's study.  One concern I have without knowing those details is the reliance on Available Personal Income.  Just because cities have the available income to support a team does not mean that they will actually do it.  There is a reason why baseball's Marlins have struggled in Miami and the NFL has been in out of LA for decades: people are spending their disposable income on things other than season tickets.   

I am fascinated by pro-sports team relocation stories (contrary to my prediction, it looks like Minnesota is going to keep the Vikings) so I was most interested in his identification of under-extended markets--he focuses on NBA teams.  Here is his list of metro areas that are under-extended and do not already have an NBA team.

Awesome Maps

Paula Scher’s Beautifully Obsessive, Rather Inaccurate Maps of the World (via Slate)

 

Some reading recommendations:

Joel Cohen has a nice op-ed today in the NYT about global population growth.  Cohen is a mathematical biologist at Columbia University.

Mary Williams Walsh had a good piece this week on the pension crisis in Rhode Island and what it means for the state government and local governments.  

John Cassidy had an interesting story about Keynes in the New Yorker a few weeks ago and it is now up for non-subscribers.  His central question: What would Keynes tell us to do now?  He also touches on how the Republican approach of tax-cuts is, even though they would deny it, a Keynesian approach.  

Slate's Tom Vanderbilt has an interesting (and fun) story on "rolling speed harmonization" which is a technique being tested on I-70 in Colorado.  By reducing average speed but keeping it constant, people get where they want to go faster and safer.

Happy reading.

"Building a Better World Series"

On today's episode of Hang Up and Listen (Slate's sports podcast which I highly recommend), Josh Levin made reference to a 2004 Slate article titled "Building a Better World Series" in which mathematician Jordan Ellenberg offers an alternative Word Series formula that, on average, produces the "better" winner more quickly.  It is a smart piece and an interesting read.

The basics are that a team wins the series when it is up 3-0, 4-1, 4-2, 5-3, or 5-4 (which ever comes first).  Of course, the format lacks the simplicity and elegance of the "Best of..." format but I do think he is on to something.  Naturally, the format has one of the same shortcomings as the current format in that as the series gets longer (it effectively turns into a best of 9 series) the less sure we are that the format has picked the best winner--such is Ellenberg's tradeoff to produce a winner quickly.  Of course, at 3-3 or 4-4 the differences between the teams are likely narrower so it is going to be more difficult to make a "true" determination of which team is better.  The problem is that these narrow difference situations are exactly the ones in which we want to know who the better team is.  My (untested and probably more imperfect) solution: after both teams get 2 losses, the winning team must win 2 games in a row to be declared a winner (like tennis).  However, 3-0 will end the series and so will 3-1 (this makes the 2-1 game very exciting). The result would be that every other game beginning with the 3-2 game would be really exciting.  Yes, the series could go on forever but such is my trade-off for producing the best winner.  

In any case, it is fun to think about.