I care about salaries of college coaches, not of presidents

I am quite happy about the NBA lockout.  Ten guys dripping with sweat and chasing a ball, all to figure out who can slide one through a hoop, for which they get paid a gazillion dollars!  A colossal waste of time and money.

Will the NBA lockout affect local economies?

"There is no way the NBA lockout will have any significant economic consequences," says the University of Alberta’s Brad Humphreys, an economist who has studied the effects of sports work stoppages.

Even worse is all the commercial aspect of college sports.

I am glad that salary raises for administrators at the University of Oregon made the news.  Thanks to all the brouhaha, we were reminded, early on in the football season, that there is a real university campus with buildings and students, associated with a local team called the Ducks.

While college sports grew out of a laudable and valid conviction that a sound mind needs a sound body too, we need to keep in perspective that football and most other college sports have veered far away from that original notion, and have morphed into yet another branch of a sprawling entertainment industry.

The question, especially during these trying times of high unemployment and stalled economic growth, is whether such entertainment delivers long term economic benefits.

This is where I begin to worry about our misplaced loud protests over a few thousand additional dollars spent on academic salaries versus the millions that we so enthusiastically invest in the college sports industry.

To begin with, all entertainment activities are not created equal.  When Hollywood produces movies and television shows, those are products consumed all over the world and not merely in California or the US.  In 2010, for example, films alone earned slightly more than $10.5 billion in the US, but earned almost 32 billion dollars at the global box offices.

These billions are significant exports, and help us tap into the niche in the global marketplace.  The niche that is often bombastically referred to in the academic jargon of “comparative advantage.” 

The corresponding employment generation that results from such a multi-billion dollar export industry is also why it feels like every other waiter in Los Angeles is a Hollywood wannabe. 

However, sports and sporting events are not in this category.  Most economic analysis routinely conclude that the stadiums, arenas and sporting events do not have consistent and long-term economic benefits and multipliers, and could even have unfavorable benefit-cost ratios. Even their local economic significance is in suspect.

College sports, in particular, serve a highly geographically restricted market even within the United States.  Professional sports are slightly better in their global appeal.  For instance, even my mostly sedentary brother is one of those many who follow this sport, even though he lives far away in Australia and has barely visited the US for a week.

Thus, as much as various college sports provide entertainment throughout the academic year, they do not generate employment and incomes with the kind of economic multipliers that, for instance, an Intel has had, and will continue to have, in the Portland metropolitan area and throughout Oregon as well.

The economic success of businesses like Intel, and entertainment activities like movie-making, are highly dependent on the other reason why college sports teams exist in the first place--the academic aspect of the universities.

Research universities push the edges of scientific and technological understanding, and it is no surprise then that a cluster of such institutions in the San Francisco area gave birth to, and continues to nurture, the huge information industry there.  It is, similarly, a symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and the universities in Southern California.  Further, we need to keep in mind that movies are not merely about lights, camera, and action anymore.  One only needs to recall the high tech wizardry of "Avatar" or any of the Pixar releases to be reminded of how technologically advanced and sophisticated this entertainment industry is.

Against such a background, I care not about the half a million dollar compensation for a university president, nor about the million dollar salary of an Intel executive, nor about the ten million dollar payday for a Hollywood actor—though, I would prefer a shuffling of that listing.  However, I am highly concerned about the phenomenal investment in college sports, including the multi-year and multiple-million dollar contracts that have become all too common for coaches in major college sports.

Successful sports teams could certainly help us forget, at least for a few hours, our individual and collective economic insecurities, but they are not going to help us build a secure and prosperous future in a rapidly changing world.