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.
profit generated by teachers is too indirect, too long term. Most people can’t even seem to conceptualize it, much less quantify it, plus who’s going to stay at a job 20+ years before they get a payoff
I agree, but the money has to come from somewhere. Athletes generate the money they are paid, and they generate a lot so they get paid accordingly.
I don’t think that we are equating profit generated as value. It’s just a fact that athletes make lots of money because they generate it.
I think that what should happen is that the organizations/teams that are making billions should be taxed higher or something equivalent and those funds should go to under paid professionals like teachers. But, I don’t think that athletes should make less because there’s enough extra profits that both can exist.
Our political system equates value to revenue and that is why we don’t tax accordingly. Business owners are labeled “job creators” and taxing them is framed as a negative value add.
Absolutely agree that athletes are also being exploited here and the burden should not fall on them to correct this (except as advocates for a better system).
WNBA entered the room.
It was more than 2000 years ago when the Romans decided to pay athletes (gladiators) way more money than the average roman worker. This isn’t a new thing.
I say it was around 1998 when George W. Bush meet with Harambe’s mom.
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. Glory be their nostrals.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.
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.
Professions that have a high pay cealing do have a different relationship to capital than miners, nurses etc., but most athletes and musicians still aren’t millionaires - a lot of professional athletes and musicians actually earn less than median wage. It just feels like a waste of effort to complain about a celebrity who owns tens of millions, when the core issue is the people who own hundreds and thousands of millions.
We aren’t talking about those athletes. Nobody thinks that professional athletes that don’t make any money are overpaid.
hey now be fair, there are absolutely sports fans who think the teams they dislike would be paid too much if their salary consisted of lethal injections.
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.
Complaining about athletes just makes it sound petty.
And your opening statement makes your entire post sound completely out of touch.
Baseball players went on strike in 1972. They’d had a ‘union’ since the 1800s, but always bowed to the owners.
Obligatory reminder that highest paid athlete in(western) history is Gaius Appuleius Diocles a Byzantine era Chariotter.
I don’t think doctors fit in that group. They are paid well, and respected, far more than nurses on both accounts.
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.
Doctors are paid like crap. Physicians are paid very well.
Yea, but that doesn’t fit OP’s childlike view of the world so shut up, nerd!
Where I live, we’ve been treating…
- Nurses very poorly. Underpaying and overworking them, while not training enough new ones.
- Family Doctors (aka. GPs) very poorly by removing the kinds of services they’re allowed to provide, increasing expenses without increasing compensation, and again, not training enough new ones.
Doctors are paid well, but they also have incredibly high expenses (and often high student debt, too).
What “childlike view”? Do you remember which jobs were considered “essential” during COVID-19 or were you too young?
I sure do. Of course doctors and nurses were essential because it was a health crisis. But it was grocery store workers, Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse workers because people are idiots and think stuff like that mattered. I remember sports teams and reality TV contestants being put in quarantine so they could safely compete. I remember it wasn’t teachers, as classes were canceled before going online only for about a year and a half.
So what’s your point?
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.
If I had to guess, “athletes” was the first thing that popped into their head. But I have to assume they mean people who don’t “arguably” contribute to furthering of humanity. So Actors, musicians, athletes vs doctors, teachers, scientists, etc.
Artists contribute to society and humanity as much as scientists. Arguably, the great painters, writers, and musicians as well as the great physicists and other specialties should regularly be paid more than athletes, movie, and radio pop stars.
All the graphs:
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.
Adam Ruins Every….no wait. Reagan Ruined Evening.
jaunty whistle
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.
I mean if you back to the Greeks and Roman’s, they also had some big payouts for sporting events.
If you were lucky, you’d get the lion’s share
They used those events for military readiness. The skills that the athletes trained for were the same ones needed by soldiers.
Gladiators were not soldiers. Some were the equivalent of American Wrestling stars.
I was thinking more about Olympians. The Romans had a standing army so they didn’t need that sort of thing as much.
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.
You really have to split it up. Teachers and nurses have always been paid pretty poorly. They were traditionally female only professions, and expected only to work until married or what not. Or they were nuns, and didn’t get paid directly. Doctors of course, being traditionally male only got paid a lot better. But I agree that for most of human history, professional athletes were just rich peoples kids. They weren’t even getting paid most likely. It would be interesting to try and figure out who the first true professional athlete was. Someone who wasn’t born into money, and actually got paid a living wage.
Professors used to be paid the same as surgeons. Surgeon salaries kept up with inflation, professor salaries did not.
OP is also only comparing top earners. For every athlete who earns millions, there’s probably hundreds of athletes who make around median income or less - it’s the kind of career where people will keep doing it even if it pays barely enough to pay the bills. There are a lot of doctors who make more than the poorer professional athletes, and doctors don’t age out.
Is pretty meaningless to look at top earners.
Some specialist doctors are making a million dollars a year, but the average is closer to $375,000.
Much like musicians, there are huge numbers of “professional” athletes that are not making a living wage. The low end for medical doctors is plenty to survive.
I think it’s distasteful when people complain about people earning six figures not getting as much as others, while we have people dying in the streets from capitalistic poverty.
People die in the streets under socialism and communism as well. You understand this, right?
To poverty at the same or similar rates with little if anything being done to combat it?
Bread and Circuses, nothing else for the filthy plebs.
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?
And when the social sector lobbies it is called “special interests” by the press. When capital owners do it they are called “job creators” by the press.
Are you talking from the pov of one specific country?
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:
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
I mean, that’s per week, and after tax… Seems like a shitload of money to me.
🤦♂️ I missed it was per week. I’ll go hide somewhere now
Ha, it happens!
Always read the fine print. ;)
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.
This. Everyone wants qualified, well paid teachers for their kids, just like how most people want universal healthcare. But our government and media structure actively disempowers any such movements in that direction. Ie “we can agree we all want these things but we can’t agree on how”
