Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
Laugh.
Utterly baseless
The studies I posted are just the tip of the iceberg in the litany of reviews by independent economists concluding that public arena investments are a colossal waste of money.
Their methodology is spot on and the reason they have published these papers is to roundly discredit and attack the baseless methodology used by the sporting industries and related parties who publish "economic impact analysis" reports that are not worth the paper they're printed on.
Unless you're smarter than a canon of economic literature I'd stop throwing out baseless claims.
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The article you posted ( I could only access the one) written by Dennis Coates was actually incredibly weak. It was pure academia, with little to no actual concrete examples test cases. It was litterally a book report for lack of a better word that did nothing by say that numerous other people wrote or studied this and said X or Y, with out providing any substantial data to back up the claims. I'm not against higher education (I value degrees and have one) and class room learning, but that piece has 0 actual business use, it was nothing more than saying "a bunch of people said this about this topic". You called the methodology spot on, but I've read that article, what was the methodology used........because it wasn't evident in that article?
For example, it gives the explanation of the "Negative Economic Impact of Sport" into 4 arguments (again none are actually backed up with case studies, just references to other studies):
1. House hold spending on sports - basic claim here is that on a PER household basis people spend the same whether there are sports or not. Meaning if you have a sports team in your town, people won't spend more on the team, they'll simply take money from other spend and put it towards sports, meaning the community doesn't see any increased spend. I wouldn't acutally dispute that point, PER house hold spend makes sense. Some key variables that are missing are the following:
- Do cities with Sports facilities actually attract MORE households to the area? Thus increasing the total pool of money spent in the area (which is good). The PER house hold is only one important variable, the total house holds and total spend are also key.
- What was the time frame on the PER household stats? One year, two years after losing a sports team? The parameters of the study aren't laid out so we don't know if it's citing long term or short term metrics.
- What was the comparison points. Two sepearate communities? One community that lost a team? Methodology isn't clear and it makes a difference.
2. Argument that sports distracts workers and makes them less productive hurting the economy. - Not much needed to say about this. It was simply an incredibly poorly backuped claim. They even used the word MAY RESULT in making the claim, then sited some studies that even the author of this article didn't seem to want to trumpet too hard.
3. Argument that it would take away from funding other areas. Again, simply a weak argument that actually wasn't even backed up with reference to another study, let alone some actual critical data. All it said, again using the word MAY, is that maybe there might be less policeman or something. Rediculously weak argument with no backing.
4. This one was hilarious, and basically irrelevant argument to the story. Making a claim that much of the revenue created by sports franchises goes towards players salaires. Fair. Then goes on to claim that Sports players save more of their money than the average joe, so spend less of it on the local economy???? Really, that's the argument? Then backed up by some loose point about the wealthy saving more? Doesn't mention anything about the wealthy also paying more taxes.
Then the kicker is it goes on to proudly claim that these four examples show that money spent on a sports facility generate less additional income than if spent elsewhere, even though no where in the argument does it remotely show that. It also claims that as long as "all other things are equal" this holds true (which again it still didn't prove that), but it also glosses over the fact that rarely will all things be equal in comparing a city with sports facilities and ones with out, potentially because of what the sports facilities drive into the area.
Regardless, that article was not one of sound methodology. It was exactly what it was meant to be, and academic paper that has little to no business value, and is certainly not a valid businesse case or case study on the topic. It may have been worthy of a B+ in a senior economics class at the UofA, but it's value to making a real business decision is as much as 0. It's a book report, nothing more.