A recent episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent podcast, Revisionist History, put forth an interesting argument about societal progress. The background was a discussion of why it’s a waste of money to donate to schools like Princeton and Harvard that already have near bottomless resources. In discussing that issue, Gladwell supported the above by using a sports analogy regarding how to maximize winning.
According to some economists who have studied the issue, the way to maximize wins in soccer is to improve your worst player. Success typically comes to those who have have better 9th, 10th, and 11th players rather than those who have the best player. It is argued that this is due to the nature of the sport being that one player typically cannot create opportunities alone. Thus, it makes sense to invest in making your least talented players better relative to your opponent. Soccer is a weak link sport for this reason.
Alternatively, basketball is a strong link sport. Typically, the team with the best player wins. It’s a star driven sport because one player can have an outsized impact on the game despite also having the worst player on the floor as a teammate. It is nearly impossible to prevent a great player from getting the ball, and/or helping his team score.
Now the question is whether the economy at large is closer to soccer or basketball. Should the government spend more time and resources trying to create a climate that maximizes the number of and the relative success of already really successful and talented people, or should it do more to help those who are unsuccessful? Obviously both are important, but is what drives progress and economic success having the best players, or is it not having the worst ones?
Basketball has half the players, the transition from defence to attack is much quicker, and i think - i could be wrong as im not a basketball fan - that the skills are less positionally specialised.
So a basketball superstar has more impact.
And the soccer teams that dont have weak links usually have some stars as well.
I don’t follow soccer much, but I keep hearing about successful teams spending huge amounts of money on one or a few really good players. And our local MLS franchise went straight into the dumper after trading its prima donna star earlier this year (he scored a ton of goals but didn’t play well with others). A single basketball superstar might score 40 points a game, but his team often loses without lesser but still vital role players.
The sports analogy sounds labored. Should the right question be whether we maximize opportunities based on talent and drive, or limit them (to whatever degree) to those who have been unsuccessful and presumably lack those qualities?
I don’t think anyone suggested it was. In fact, I explicitly acknowledged the importance of both.
Here is the book, an outline of the podcast episode in question, and a link to another book supporting the theory broadly. The latter book linked to posits (according to Gladwell) that England was successful during the industrial revolution not because it had more geniuses like James Watt, but rather because they had better “bench” players so to speak.
The last part is generally wrong. The game is changing such that players can play more than one position, but specializaion is still very important. This is why around 17% of people 7 feet or taller in the US have played in the NBA, and the two smallest guys on the court are almost always handling the ball most often.
More importantly, I am not sure you understood the analogy as the things you listed support Gladwell’s argument. It is precisely because basketball has fewer players that a given player can typically dominate the game. That is WHY a basketball superstar has more impact.
Yes, of course. The point is that, as a strategy, having a higher floor is better than a higher ceiling because a singular mistake or bad player can lose the game for you due to the low scoring nature of soccer. In basketball, you can only abuse a relatively worse player so much given zone defenses and the nature of the sport. Additionally, one mistake from a bad basketball player doesn’t cost you the game when it costs you, at most, 4 points out of a hundred or so.
We have to read a book to debate this? Can’t you excerpt or summarize the data in some way? It sounds conveniently like someone who doesn’t like the “Great Man” theory of history and invented some counter argument that would appeal to sports fans.
And in the real world. you don’t pit basketball teams against soccer teams, but every country competes (in some sense) against the others, so I’m just not seeing how the analogy even makes sense. If the world is fielding a bunch of basketball teams, why would you field a soccer team to compete in that environment, and vice versa?
Let’s be clear. No one is saying don’t focus on having great players. In fact, the system in most sports with no salary caps and teams with near limitless resources breaks down given a team like Barca generally doesn’t need to choose between having the best star player and a better 11th man.
This pretty much doesn’t happen. Not only because basically no one averages 40ppg, but because those top scorers are, not coincidentally, almost always on the best teams. That’s the point. Given that all NBA teams basically have the same amount of money to acquire players, having the best player, even if it’s at the expense of having a worse bench, is going to be a better strategy to win more games.
I suppose you can put the sports analogy to the side, but I think it highlights a very interesting dichotomy that has real world implications. For example, is it better to give Princeton money rather than giving it to a state school or community college? Does it make sense to forgive student loans as suggested by some on the left when you have many primary schools that are failing students? Does it make sense to cut taxes on the rich as suggested by many on the right rather than raising the EITC? Should we make the climate for corporations better at the expense of workers?
Yes, there are plenty of other, unrelated pros and cons in the arguments for any of the above, but it is important to have a basis for understanding involving the better way to allocate resources. The point being that where you are inclined to seek gains matters a great deal.
I think I summarized the argument pretty succinctly. Here is a guy who did a modest dive into the NBA data. Here are some other someothers summarizing the data:
I am not sure you are understanding the point. The sports are stand-ins for strategy. The strategy being, do we, as many on the right argue, invest in making the best better by lowering barriers, taxes, etc. Or do you try harder to raise the floor as many on the left argue by doing things like making college and healthcare cheaper, etc. Countries do in fact employ different strategies broadly speaking. The are not pure strategies as even very capitalistic countries like Hong Kong and Singapore give huge housing subsidies to the poor/middle class. But, strategy matters.
Whether or not the simplifications of soccer and basketball are true doesn’t matter on iota to the question at hand. Odd that the discussion is so wrapped up on an irrelevant detail.
“Does the economy function best when attention is paid to increasing the production of the highest producers or increasing the production of the lowest producers.”
I think the sports analogy may be taking too much of the attention here. The argument about economic success doesn’t actually require the view of soccer and basketball to be correct.
The argument would be that the international ‘competition’ is a ‘soccer game,’ so if others are ‘playing’ like ‘basketball teams,’ you will do very well to focus on a different strategy.
But again, I think MG might have gotten too cute with the hook (not the first time), and the core debate may be better reframed without any sports references.
Maybe, but it still bothers me, because the exact opposite of his analogy is more correct. In an 11 player sport, a weak link is less harmful than in a 5 player sport.
As in, you could place me as a left back in Juventus and even with me being useless, Juve would still win Serie A. But put me as a doubles partner with Jokovic and we aren’t winning a single match ever.
First, all the evidence and data I am aware of shows it isn’t wrong in context. That context is that you are not replacing a player with a random person, but rather a vetted professional player.
Second, the number of people playing is not the important variable. Hockey is largely weak link despite having the same number of players as basketball. Yes, you can hide a weak link easier when there are a greater number of participants, but hiding a player with no upside is not something a professional team ever has to do because there are no unskilled players.
That said, the sports analogy is not really the point as already noted.
Individual businesses aren’t members of a team, they are competing teams. The NFL has tried to maintain parity among teams in terms of talent, and the government does similar things with anti-trust laws. But business is still a competition and the government should allow that competition within a framework of fairness, and the NFL should redistribute the star players around the league.
The economy is more like basketball. You need a bunch of really smart people to make new innovations and then the regular folk can build and use those innovations. It took a genius to make the first Apple II but to make the rest all it took was factory workers and a smart person to organize them. Having smarter janitors makes for cleaner floors but not new innovations.
But isn’t the best way to ensure we have a sufficient and maximal number of really smart people to ensure that we stop precluding large segments of the population from paths which could allow them to gain the skills necessary to innovate? Or even to just have more skilled laborers to continually improve the machines built by those “geniuses”. After all, one of the things Steve Jobs mentioned as a reason Apple doesn’t manufacture a lot in the US is the dearth of engineers.
Awesome, can you link to your book written about the subject since you seem to have supreme confidence in your knowledge of how soccer works? The book is the book. Gladwell had nothing to do with it, so whatever qualms you have with him are irrelevant. This was studied empirically. If you doubt the study, cite your evidence, rather than just stating that it must be wrong based on your gut feeling.