Submitted 3 hours ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Athletes that have spent thousands of hours training their whole lives to be the some of best in the world at their craft, generate billions of dollars doing their job. Why shouldn’t they get paid well from that pool of billions?
Teachers, nurses, etc should get paid more, but their professions don’t generate the same kind of revenue as the entertainment industry, so that money has to come from some other source, like the government.
Revenue is not the same as value, teachers enable much more economic activity than athletes. The fact we equate “profit generated” to the value of the profession is part of the problem.
Look up Ronald Reagan’s administration.
lol
Was gonna say “IDK, but I am willing to be it was during Reagan’s presidency” and this is the first comment I see.
Why athletes? People attack athletes all the time and ignore that the team owners make $ with a B instead of an M. CEOs do far less for their organization than athletes and make far more money.
Was thinking about this in the context of a joke I heard in the late 90s:
What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.
We didn’t we have jokes like that about the billionaires; at the time people were glazing Bill Gates. It’s wild because billionaires are the ones writing the laws, lawyers just act it out.
Is there a point you can find in history where we paid doctors, teachers, and nurses close to what they’re worth and more than professional athletes?
It sounds like you’re nostalgic for a time that never existed.
There was definitely a time when professional athlete was hardly a career, and certainly not well paid. So for a time teachers and healthcare workers got paid more than athletes.
In the CFL (Canadian Football League) the players don’t make more than $100,000/yr generally, and the good ones get scooped up to the NFL.
1980’s Reaganomics, early recession, rising inequality, “greed is good” culture, heightened Cold War tensions, the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and societal shifts towards consumerism. The 80’s was also a time of technological boom with computers, MTV, and cultural dynamism, with critiques often focusing on increased individualism, materialism, and social challenges.
I think the seeds may have been planted with the radio. Once athletes became celebrities it was only a matter of time. I know little about baseball, but even I know who Babe Ruth was, who played into the 1930s. TV blowing up in the 40s added an additional layer of connecting the names to the faces. This eventually gave way for MTV to come into the mix creating the beginnings of modern pop culture.
I’m not sure why OP or other comments are so hung up on the Athlete part? One of the most famous and wealthiest athletes of all time was a Roman charioteer. Gaius Appuleius Diocles was a celebrity across empires and predated doctors, Jesus and the radio. The only people that got paid more than Gaius were landowners/lords, which is still true to this day.
A lot of jackass answers in here but this is the answer to the spirit of the question.
Reaganomics or it’s other name “trickle down” economics is what you want to start looking into.
I don’t think doctors fit in that group. They are paid well, and respected, far more than nurses on both accounts.
Yea, but that doesn’t fit OP’s childlike view of the world so shut up, nerd!
What “childlike view”? Do you remember which jobs were considered “essential” during COVID-19 or were you too young?
Where I live, we’ve been treating…
Doctors are paid well, but they also have incredibly high expenses (and often high student debt, too).
Going back in history, a doctor/surgeon/dentist and barber were the same. At some point a doctor became elevated to something more than meat technician. Probably the English during the Enlightenment with their different scientific clubs that helped distinguish doctors.
Complaining about athletes just makes it sound petty. Athletes are just employees, if you’re going to complain, complain about the athletes’ and nurses’ employers. Rich people never gave a flying fuck about their employees, and underfunded schools are a feature for them, too.
And the overwhelming majority of athletes do not earn well. It’s only the top 1% that gets rich, and only those in sports with a lot of public appeal.
I always hate when this argument is used when were talking about celebrities here. As if a famous athlete or a famous musicians relation to labour and the benefits of that labour is at all comparable to say a coal miner’s relationship with capital.
Baseball players went on strike in 1972. They’d had a ‘union’ since the 1800s, but always bowed to the owners.
Complaining about athletes just makes it sound petty.
And your opening statement makes your entire post sound completely out of touch.
This is just capitalism, isn’t it?
Athletes and entertainers that make millions do so because people pay for it in large numbers. This is what capitalism wants and does.
I agree with your sentiment but I think you’re just critiquing capitalism. If I had my way these people would be taxed up the wazoo. No baseball player or Hollywood actor should ever be worth 10s of millions, let alone hundreds, or billions.
I think some of this is related to radio, tv and internet too. Before radio few people could follow a game live so the audience, or at least live emotional audience, is a lot smaller and that’s pretty aligned to profit. Or put another way, if every Messi or Taylor Swift fan gave 50c every year they’d be filthy rich but that was harder to ached before radio with things being more localised.
A friend shared this a month or so ago and I haven’t been able to check how accurate it is but apparently its soccer player wages in 1999:
Highest soccer earners in 1999
That was a lot of money at the time, but even adjusting for inflation it really doesn’t seem to be the fuckoff money they get now
False dichotomy. First not all athletes are paid « astronomically ». That’s only a particular subset and in very particular exposures. The reason they makes millions is because they makes billions for the team’s owner. Now this owners use their billions to ensure that the world continues that way.
Second athletes have normally a really really short career vs. Doctor. They mortgage their bodies (and their mental sanity) in a 10 years period and are unable to work very well after that if your salary don’t represent that their no point in doing it and the owner will not make money.
All in all. Athletes are workers (with some benefit) like us and should be seen as such. The real grinch are the owners
Bread and Circuses, nothing else for the filthy plebs.
I understand the skepticism on society’s priorities.
Athletes are literally 1-in-a-million individuals. They bring in crazy amounts of money from people who want to watch them play.
The real problem is that there are so many people who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to watch a sports game, but not willing to see teachers properly compensates (in my opinion). Because athletes getting a big share of the pie that they’re bringing in sounds fair to me. The question is why people have that much pie to give them, and not as much pie to give to schools.
I think the real problem is a government structure that lends itself to being captured by monied interests. The problem of capitalism chasing the money is only a problem because we have a government unable to properly tax the wealthy to ensure no one can amass the kind of wealth that makes it possible to capture the government.
You mean the social sector being chronically underpaid with no improvement in sight? I blame less and less regulated lobbyism, a.k.a. legal corruption. Because the social sector doesn’t have one, usually. It would often amount to the government bribing itself. What, politicians making good decisions without looking out for a payday, you say?
Always leaving the mechanics out lol. My career is always under looked but yet everyone comes crawling in when their car doesn’t work haha
I believe the standard singularity was in 1971. At least, according to wtfhappenedin1971.com
November 6th 1988
Nothing special about they day really. It’s just happened to be the day when the Legrand Poumpaugh themselves decreed as such. Praise their nostrals.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 12 minutes ago
A lot of people from the US seem to be ignoring the rest of the world exists and screaming Reagan (the US president from 1981-1989). I honestly don’t know how accurate that is but its obviously not nuanced and biased by anti-Trump sentiment
I’m not sure how accurate this article is either but it mentions the salary cap for soccer in England being removed in 1960 and that leading to a rapid increase in wages there.
salaryleaks.com/…/average-salary-premier-league-h…
A quick scan of the internet led me to this chart that compares top soccer players to median income in (for some reason) the US
Top international soccer player income compared to median family income for 1901, 1920, 1951, 1957, 1958
From: www.expensivity.com/soccer-salary-inflation/
Here’s another chart from the same article for how many times a US families income a top international player makes (and like the England article the 60s look to be exponential growth, then noise in the 70s then pretty clear from the 80s):
Timeline of top internal player money proportional to the median US income for a family
A lot of that analysis has space for biases but I’m pretty sure that modern large sports wages predate Reagan