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Daily Wisdom: The Futility of Unplugging

Casey Cep argues that the movement to disconnect from the Internet is pointless: Unplugging seems motivated by two contradictory concerns: efficiency and enlightenment. Those who seek efficiency rarely want to change their lives, only to live more productively; rather than eliminating technology, they seek to regulate their use of it through Internet-blocking programs like Freedom […]

March 25, 2014/by dpogreba

Daily Wisdom: Are NCAA Athletes Underpaid?

Daily Wisdom

David Berri, using the example of the Kansas men’s basketball team, says they are: To illustrate, prior to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Embiid had produced 4.67 wins for the Kansas Jayhawks (calculated essentially according this approach used for the NBA). Using college revenue data from the U.S. Department of Education, economist Robert Brown (for […]

March 24, 2014/by dpogreba

Daily Wisdom: The Futility of Unplugging

Daily Wisdom

March 25, 2014/by dpogreba

Daily Wisdom: Are NCAA Athletes Underpaid?

Daily Wisdom

March 24, 2014/by dpogreba

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Daily Wisdom: The Futility of Unplugging

Daily Wisdom

Casey Cep argues that the movement to disconnect from the Internet is pointless:

Unplugging seems motivated by two contradictory concerns: efficiency and enlightenment. Those who seek efficiency rarely want to change their lives, only to live more productively; rather than eliminating technology, they seek to regulate their use of it through Internet-blocking programs like Freedom and Anti-Social, or through settings like Do Not Disturb. The hours that they spend off the Internet aren’t about purifying the soul but about streamlining the mind. The enlightenment crowd, by contrast, abstains from technology in search of authenticity, forsaking e-mail for handwritten letters, replacing phone calls with face-to-face conversations, cherishing moments instead of capturing them with cameras. Both crowds are drawn to events like the Day of Unplugging, and some members even pay premiums to vacation at black-hole resorts that block the Internet and attend retro retreats that ban electronics. Many become evangelists of such technological abstinence, taking to social media and television, ironically, to share insights from their time in the land of innocence.

It’s a priggish impulse that I indulged for years; despite enjoying much of what the Internet had to offer, I fancied myself a Luddite because I refused to create a Facebook account. I threw many stones from my glass house, criticizing my friends’ digital connections and their endless attention to feeds and posts and pokes. And yet, while I didn’t poke, I did text; I didn’t write posts, but I did send e-mails.

March 25, 2014/by dpogreba

Daily Wisdom: Are NCAA Athletes Underpaid?

Daily Wisdom

David Berri, using the example of the Kansas men’s basketball team, says they are:

To illustrate, prior to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Embiid had produced 4.67 wins for the Kansas Jayhawks (calculated essentially according this approach used for the NBA). Using college revenue data from the U.S. Department of Education, economist Robert Brown (for research Brown, I, and a few others are working on) estimated that one win for the Kansas men’s basketball team was worth $159,601 in 2010-11 ($166,585 in 2014 dollars). Given these two numbers, Embiid was worth approximately $777,286 (again, prior to the tournament). If we take the USA Today number seriously, this means the Jayhawks have underpaid Embiid by a bit more than $650,000.

Repeating the same calculation for every player on the Jayhawks, we see, as the following table illustrates, that Andrew Wiggins (who some people think is worth the number one pick in the NBA draft) was only the fourth most productive Jayhawk this year. Even though Wiggins has underperformed relative to expectations, he has still been underpaid by more than $450,000. And combined, this entire team has been underpaid by about $2 million.

March 24, 2014/by dpogreba