The key to successful public forecasting is to choose a subject that is too costly for your critics to formally measure. In keeping with such a spirit of low risk public posturing, I am hereby calling it: peak pessimism is now behind us. Which is not to say that people think things are fine, but rather that the gap between how things actually are (pretty good!) and how people think they are (kinda bad) is much smaller than the gap was six months ago (historically bad, even though they were pretty good then too!). The gloom of sunny days benighted by the goth-tinted glasses of an anxiety-serving media amplified by the terminally online is finally breaking.

For me, the real bellweather was the general non-response to a NYT article and Siena poll that said Biden was likely to lose to Trump head-to-head next November. Six months ago this would have received breathless coverage, with non-stop amplification on social media. What I observed instead was a lot of hand-waving and dismissal of an attempt for political panic clickbait.

So what’s my reasoning? In a nutshell, rational pessimism.

I’m a big believer in ecological rationality i.e. a lot of our seemingly irrational biases are actually relatively optimal behaviors when viewed in the long term for individual survival or cultural/group selection. Pessimism is an expressed preference for fewer negative surprises. From a households perspective, being surprised by a negative shock is far more dangerous to economic survival than being surprised by or even missing out on positive shocks. Choosing to rent intstead of buying a house in 2000 was, in hindsight, problematic, but not nearly so dangerous to your economic survival as buying a house in December of 2007. Not to get too Lamarckian on you, but it’s not crazy to say that the pandemic was such a (Knightian/Black Swan) shock to a lot of people that they updated their entire model of the economy to include the possibility of an entirely new kind of negative economic shock and, as a result, their new strategy is far more pessimistic. They very badly don’t want to be surprised again.

But that doesn’t mean they are done updating. At some point the good news is just too good to ignore. Employment is too good, wages are too good. New vaccines are too good. Climate data is…well that’s still pretty bad, but hey look, solar is happening! Good news, however, is an erosive force running against a freshly built wall of pessimism designed for the express purpose of protecting a household from the next negative shock. We shouldn’t be surprised if it takes a lot of good news a long time to break it down.

But it will break down. I’m not saying when it will break down, but the cracks are finally starting to show. Pessimism may be ecologically rational, but optimism always has an irresistible allure for those who don’t want to miss out. We’re starting to get the good news because people are starting to want it, even if only just a little bit. And media customers always get what they want.*

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* Which is not to say that Fox News and similar outlets won’t remain consistently negative. Political and age-demographic demands for “everything is going to hell” aren’t going to change any time soon. They will also keep getting what they want.

I’ve thought it over and decided not to write a post this week. It’s not that I have writer’s block. I am writing plenty in the dimensions of my profession that dominate my time (and actually pay me). And I have a back catalog of “bigger” pieces I might write later. But there is nothing I am compelled to write today. Which is what I want to write about.

We all share editorials and thinkpieces with each other, whizzing around social media and email, getting discussed over meals and beverages. This content is produced in mass and at breakneck speed. Some people are very good at it. Others less so. Some people, over time, rise to a level of recognition that they are offered plum spots at major outlets, lavished with salaries greater than I will certainly ever enjoy. Their names acquire significant fame, their opinions serving as the substrate for millions of conversations.

And then we savage them.

Sometimes we savage their works because they are signaling the wrong politics and identities. That’s just life. Sometimes we savage their writing because they’re rich and famous, which is annoying, but that’s just the tax a person pays for being eminent (see Swift, Jonathan). But often, more often than they would likely want to admit, we savage their writing as poor and ill-conceived because it is poor and ill-conceived.

Let’s be clear: these people are largely critical thinkers and phenomenonal writers. But they are also on a deadline. Opinions, unlike news, do not appear in our minds fully formed and their subsequent development does not always adhere to a regular schedule. My writings here are essentially an unpaid hobby. I haven’t missed many weeks this last 3 years, but I’ve missed a few. Some weeks I totally mail it in and just write a few paragraphs about a research paper I read that I thought was cool. The New York Times editorial page does not indulge such academic capriciousness.

Would I invest a lot more time in these posts if the NYT was paying me a hefty salary? Of course. I would have stockpiles of evergreen columns, folders of half-written ideas, a corkboard littered with post-its cataloging my every idea that might support a column. But even then I can’t help but suspect that I might occasionally find myself staring down a deadline with nothing I want to say, or with a drafted piece that I know isn’t very good.

And that’s why I think we get the so many big-name editorials that social media descends on like gleeful hyenas, merrily yanking and ripping until the every vacuous subject and failed predicate has yielded it’s final LOL. Why do columnists collectively produce so much dreck? Because they write too much. Scratch that. Because they publish too much.

Which is why I’m not writing a post this week.

(To be clear out of an abundance of caution, this observation does not pertain to those glorious blogs and substacks that mostly produce data-driven analysis and subject-matter deep dives, rather than bloated opinions designed to foment clicks. You are god’s perfect children, never change.)

Sometimes we think things have been incontrovertibly been proven, but we really only know them. Other times we think we know them but we really only think them. It’s always interesting when we something we think becomes something we know. We share those beliefs a little more often with a little more confidence. We start trying to tilt the balance of common knowledge one conversation at a time. I’d argue, however, that we would often be better served to wait until something is proven, as much as something can be proven. Or, at the very least, that our conversational was weight shifted far more when truly compelling evidence hits the scene.

I already believed that New York City’s infamous “Stop and Frisk” program was bad. That the bad outweighed the good. I was always careful to soften my language, to hedge my claims, however, because I always suspected there had to be some margins on which the program yielded some benefit to someone, somewhere, in some context. Criminal deterrence is real, after all.

I no longer feel any need to soften my language or claims one iota. There are research papers that change your priors. There are also ones that harden them into granite. Jonathan Tebes and Jeffrey Fagan have a new working paper they are presenting at conferences and quietly circulating that provides the single most compelling research effort into the effects of Stop and Frisk I have come across to date, one which makes the case that Stop and Frisk had now measurable effect at the margin to deter crime while, at the same came, causing significant harm to the young Black men walking the streets of New York City.

Please go through the slides, but let me summarize. Using a credible and clever event study design around the end of Stop and Frisk, Tebes and Fagan are able to identify the effect of stops on crime, finding an impressively precise null effect. They then look the effect of these stops of neighborhood schooling outcomes, specifically interruptions to instruction, persistent absences, suspensions, and graduation. The result, again, is very clear: Stop and Frisk was a disaster for high school age Black Men.

I’m just going to leave it there. Read the slides, read the paper when they release it, update your priors. And when someone tries to tell you at Thanksgiving dinner this year that New York City is going straight to hell because they ended Stop and Frisk, have the confidence to vigorously attempt to update their priors. Will it work? I’ve never met your family…but probably not.

But you gotta try, right? It’s your duty. And then make yourself a drink or take an extra slice of pie knowing that you earned it.

First, read this story from the NYT about the biggest producer of content on OnlyFans. TLDR; a couple have a compound in Florida and a full stable of employees (writers, editors, accountants, cooks, etc.) all being coordinated around the gigabytes of data generated by the supply and demand of their sexy content. If they were selling in a less stigmatized market, whis would be taught as a case study at business schools.

What I found interesting is how it simultaneously validated and assuaged all my fears about the opportunity to emotionally manipulate large numbers of people by using highly granular data. Don’t get me wrong, that’s arguably the story of every information-deficient marketing campaign ever, but I’m not talking about coarse, subliminal manipulation (“Look at this fully self-actualized person drive a car that signals their worth to strangers and their father”). I mean direct, interpersonal maninipulation through the fabrication of intimate parasocial bonds. The ability to allow customers to create their own, bespoke, false narrative in which they have a relationship with a beautiful stranger. At scale.

It’s that list bit that matters. What this couple have deconstructed is a formula for producing intimate parasocial relationships worth thousands of dollars to customer at scale.

The exploitation of fabricated relationships for income is the story behind the worlds oldest profession, not to mention most scams, for a very long time. The ability to produce them at any real scale, however, has been far more elusive. When someone pulls it off they’ve usually created a cult, whether it’s a new religion or a political cult of personality, and it’s worth taking note of. So have these Onlyfans creators laid out the blue print for future politicians, social entrepreneurs, and general power seekers? Are we at the beginning of an industrial revolution for social movements?

Actually, I kind of think they do have a blue print, but it’s going to be a minute before it crosses the chasm to other sectors because most fields that rely on parasocial relationships to grow don’t have the luxury of immediate profitability that sex work does. You might start your social movement with the ambition of analyzing every bit of data so your stable of employees in your Smithian pin factory of communications and content can rapidly grow your follower base, but you’re not going to have any money to pay them. What people tend to forget about sex work industries is that they generate revenue from minute one (that’s exactly what lures people into making what have historically been less than optimal long term personal decisions). By comparison, religious and political aspirants are a bunch of broke boys.

Religion and politics look like they have a lot of money until you consider size of the customer base (most people) and the sectors they influence (nearly all of them).  $14 billion was spent on federal election campaigns in the United States in 2020, the most ever. That sounds like a lot until you realize that a) it’s 2 and 4 year cycles and b) the federal government spends $6 trillion per year. By comparison, $5.5 billion poured through just OnlyFans, just last year. (Do I even need to convince you that new religious and social movements are notoriously short on cash?)

The story of each stage of the internet is the same thing over and over: a group of people couldn’t benefit from scale before but now they can. Social minorities looking to date couldn’t find each other before, now they can. People buying and selling pez dispensors can’t find each other, now they can. People with extreme beliefs were socially ostracized now they can find and reaffirm each other. People selling content to niche audiences used to have to find their customers through large media companies now they can do it directly. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both had disproportionate impact on American politics in part because they leverage the internet to disintermediate their ostenisble political parties. That’s the internet bringing scale to parts of the American electorate previously too distant from the median voter.

Power and ambition be damned, however, aspirant leaders are still not going to be able to build what two people selling naughty pictures in Florida were able to do because most people don’t want to pay for politics. Just ask every newspaper in the country struggling to stay afloat. We’re entering a new age of scale in the fake relationships being sold to us, but it will only be for the kinds of relationships we actually want. That doesn’t mean those will be emotionally nutritious relationships, but choice will remain intact. Portfolios of relationships for a lot of people are going to change, but I suspect its going to look less like Evita Peron and Jim Jones, and a lot more like Taylor Swift and Frito Lay.

Marketing will become more granular, more personal, more intrusive, and more effective. If this fills you with anxiety, I hope you can take some solace knowing its mostly going to happen for the stuff you are willing to pay for, like love, family, and your sense of self-worth. Data-enabled relationship fabrication will grow in market share as artificial intelligence crowds out the classically information driven side of marketing. The uncanny of valley of cringe is a customer relations disaster, a trap whose lines are invisible and always moving. For AI to learn where the boundaries lie is to move them. Which means this decidedly human labor market will grow all the faster. And a blue print for selling naughty content from a Florida couple will find its way to selling you damn near everything else.

Housing remains the most expensive monthly outlay for most Americans. There are signs of things getting better, but the fact remains that for those living within the first or second ring of suburbs surrounding a given city, space is at a premium. For this holiday season, give the gift of not taking up any more of that precious, precious space.

Don’t give them instant pots or juicers for their already full kitchen counter. Don’t give them clothes to go in their overflowing closets. Don’t give them knick knacks, tschotckes, or decorative thingamajigs that will rapidly migrate from shelves to bins to (shudder) storage units. Don’t get them stuff.

I’m not going to say get them “an experience” because we’ve all become a little weary of that cliche. What I suggest is getting them a luxury that might fall at the margins of their budget. Get them a massage. A facial. A stretching session (that’s a real thing). If they line wine or whiskey, get them a bottle they’ve never tried. The stuff they already like is easy, but my expectation is that is probably already in their budget. Gift them the risk of trying something they might not like.

Books are acceptable because there is an entire ecosystem that exists that take books from one home to the next once it has been read. Get them a subscription to Amazon Music or a download code for a new game on their PlayStation. Get them tickets to a concert or play. Get them a two hour cleaning service.

Babysit their kids for a Saturday. Tell them their hair looks nice and really sell it that you mean it. Leave them alone for a couple days so they can recooperate from a long week. Just no more stuff please.

I had the opportunity to present a new paper about theft to the faculty and students at two law schools last week. The questions and comments were interesting throughout, but I noticed a pattern in several of the questions from students: were we attributing too much rationality and sophistication to criminals?

Citing Becker (1968) as a useful exercise in applying economic parsimony to understanding how punishment and enforcement deter crime is one thing, but I think it’s simplicity sometimes undercuts a really important intuition that I hold to strongly: crime is boring. More specifically, a lot of crime (not all, of course) is a product of a banal calculus that arrives at the conclusion that my expected life (probabilistically) is better if I take this illegal action. These crimes seem irrational is because of two behavioral errors, not on the part of criminal, but on the part of the observer.

The first mistake is failing to realize you are observing the conclusion ex post, after the outcome has been revealed, and your ability to observe it is almost exclusively because the action failed i.e. they got caught. You know they got arrested for shoplifting an item that won’t significantly change the quality of their life. This feels like a mistake, but what you can’t observe is how many times they or someone else has taken the same action without negative consequences. If 1 in 10,000 thefts worth $500 are caught, then that’s probably an optimal choice for a lot of people.

The second mistake is implicitly assuming the same level of constraints that apply to your life apply to the criminal actor. We all know the question asking whether it is a sin to steal bread to feed a starving family, but that same logic applies in broader and less severe circumstances when considering the ex ante rationality of a choice. The cost-benefit analysis facing a potential thief is far different if they already carry the stigma of a criminal record. If their labor market opportunities are limited. If rent they have insufficient funds to cover is due is three days.

I find it interesting that people who disavow the salience of IQ and the people that place IQ at the center of their core model of humanity both seem to consistently underappreciate the sophistication of most human problem solvers. I’m not saying we all get the math right. Quite to the contrary, not only do we make constant errors in judgement, but the duress of operating under difficult constraints likely makes optimal decision-making all the more difficult. But those errors are relatively modest relative to the humans who are, at a baseline, tremendously sophisticated. They want and need resources and they can conceive of myriad manners in which to acquire them. Applying a lesser sophistication to people who steal from a CVS and sell to a middle-man who turns it over at a street corner or on Amazon puts any policy design at a disadvantage from the start.

If you want to divert people out of illegal markets and into legal labor, you’re better served treating them as people who made the optimal decision. Your ambition should not be to change their decision-making, but to change what the optimal decision is.

The Republicans can’t seem to elect a speaker of the house. This seems like a classic collective action problem, where the prisoner’s dilemma is a holding everyone back as they all try to individually free ride, hold out, defect, etc. But I think there is something deeper happening here that is actually quite simple.

Republicans are struggling to take a collective action because too many of them have no interest in producing any public good at all. As Mitt Romney observed, Jim Jordan has never authored legislation nor even sponsored a bill that passed. Humans have spent thousands of years devising clever mechanisms for solving collective action problems in pursuit of public goods, but the crux has always been a public good that could be pointed towards as a point of coordination and motivation for pushing through uncertainty and personal risk. If you are congressperson who has no interest in changing or defending the body of law, then the goal of electing a speaker within your party has no interest to you. In fact, failure to elect a speaker is actually preferred if that failure is generating attention that builds awareness of you and your personal brand.

Democrats should heed the warning of what they are observing as well. A small minority of pure attention seekers can shut down an entire party at the choke points both purposefully and accidentally placed within our constitutional republic. Collective action is everywhere and always fragile, not least of all when some participants have no interest in the public goods that might be produced.

For those earnestly interested in addressing issues surrounding firearms in the United States (and not just aligning with a political coalition), this working paper from Moshary, Shapiro, and Drango (MSD from here on) is an absolute must read. The technical moves are an interesting overlap of industrial organization economics and marketing analytics, but the punchlines all hit on the same topic: how do current and possible future firearms owners respond to prices for different products? When MSD estimate the price elasticities for different firearms, they are in effect asking one of those deep questions in economics that is always lying below the surface: are these goods substitutes?

It’s uncanny how much of the disputes within economic policy and regulation come down to how one defines substitutes. Is Coca-Cola a monopoly? Well, that depends on whether or not you think Pepsi or water is a close enough substitute. Should vapes be banned? That depends on how much demand you think will shift over to traditional cigarrettes. No matter your thoughts on marijuana legalization, I promise you the marketing and lobbying wings of the largest alcohol distributors have invested a lot in determining if cannabis is a substitute for their products (spoiler: it is).

Should assault weapons be banned? I am on the record as saying they should be, but the results in MSD give me pause. The bulk of firearms deaths are from handguns, and the bulk of people in the market for an assault rifle point to a handgun as their next-best alternative if an assault rifle is not an option. Would an assault rifle ban have the unintended consequence of pulling more handguns into the market and, in turn, create more firearms deaths?

This is not an easy question to answer because we haven’t actually taken the time to define the good. And by define the good, I mean define the bundle of attributes actually being purchased. The most obvious attribute of a firearm is the ability to point it at a living creature and take away its entire future. That it is such a chilling capacity that we sometimes fail to fill in the rest of the ledger. Firearms are a source of personal security, no small detail for isolated individuals. They are a means of pest control, an absolute necessity for anyone farming or raising smaller livestock. They are a way of signaling your group identity to others. Of affirming your idependence and strength. They are collectable, both as historical vintages and customizable baubles. They are highly effective at hunting game. They are fun to shoot at targets.

All of that means that when we consider banning, regulating, or taxing a specific class of firearm, we have to think really hard about the bundle of attributes being purchased and consumed, and what the next best alternative is for each customer shifted to a different product on the margin. The outcomes are perhaps more unpredictable than is often considered. Who is the marginal customer and what exactly is it that they want?

Consider a ban on assault rifles. Some will shift their demand to the black market. Despite the obvious danger in a group of individuals who illegally purchase high power firearms, we can actually ignore them at this stage because there’s no option where they don’t acquire assault weapons. What about the rest? Some are desperate to protect their homes. Hopefully they will be easier to persuade now that a shotgun is their best option (pro tip: it always was). Some want to maximize their capacity to do harm: absent maximal power, they may now opt for concealability and mobility i.e. a handgun. This seems like a particularly viable story in states that allow for the carrying of concealed weapons in public with or without a license.

Some, however, might view their $1200-$3000 might be better spent putting a snorkel on their jeep engine ($700), a bowie knife on their hip ($250), and bottle of Michters Single Barrel Whiskey on their shelf ($500*). Maybe they’ll blow it all at once on a lift kit for their truck. We can rest assured that the marketplace will offer no shortage of goods that offer little value save for people to impress their friends with what they just bought, which is a blessing. Substitution to tactical sunglasses and raunchy mudflaps is unequivicably preferable to more Glock 19s.

What about a ban on handguns? Here MSD identifiy an important asymmtry: customers in the market for a handgun don’t consider long guns, while would be purchasers of long guns frequently explicitly consider a handgun on their 2nd choice. From the point of view of minimizing firearms deaths, a ban on handguns may be optimal, but it is hard to predict what the substitutes will be. Based on their measured elasticities of demand for different types of guns, MSD estimate that a 10% tax on all firearms would have the same net effect on total firearms in the market. Perhaps most importantly, it is highly unlikely to backfire into a shift in market composition towards assault weapons, something that can’t be ruled out by a handgun ban. Combined with current political realities, a tax on firearm would appear more feasible than any broad class bans.

For a large, but not unanimous, share of social scientists studying firearms, the outcome desired is 1) a smaller fraction Americans with access to firearms, and 2) reduced capacity to commit large scale acts of violence with high powered firearms. Putting aside any disagreement on the desired outcomes, the policy steps forward still allow for meaningful uncertainty. Yes, I know that heavily restricting firearms in Australia has been wildly successful. It’s hard to argue with a total homicide rate roughly a tenth of the US rate. But we can only consider the policy options that are actually on the table and the voter status quo. Current options are likely limited to either a narrow ban on a subset firearms or a modest tax on them all. The status quo is one where a third of all Americans own a gun, 81% of whom feel safer because they have one.

Given these unavoidable constraints, good firearms policy (not optimal, merely good) requires knowing what it is that people are buying so we can tilt the playing field in the right way. We live in a world where politicians are sending AR-15 toting Christmas cards and pantomime tough guys are ordering their Subway Chicken Teriyakis while armed to the gills. There’s no policy prescription that’s going to magically create earnest politicians and emotionally secure men, but everyone responds to prices.

*I apologize to fans of Michters, I just don’t like their bourbon very much relative to the price. If you want to impress your friends, track down a bottle of William Larue Weller. It’s expensive, but it might be the best bourbon in the world, and that includes all of the Pappys.**

**Okay, its not as good as the Stitzel-Weller Pappy 20 I first tried in 2011. That’s still the greatest thing I’ve ever consumed. But that doesn’t exist anymore as far as I know or could hope to afford. My advice is to let it all go and just buy a bottle of Four Roses Single Barrel. Always less than $50, always fantastic.

Francesca Gino has been acused of academic fraud. She claims she is innocent. I am not going to adjudicate here whether she committed fraud. What I am going to argue is that she and many other high volume researchers aren’t actually engaged in research. They are grant procurers, managers, high volume writers, globetrotting presenters. But they are not researchers because they are too far removed from the actual production of research. Now, to be clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean the world is worse off. Their comparative advantage may lie in everything from management to carnival barking, but there is a threshold, a degrees-too-far removed from the problem solving at which point you are you no longer a scholar. What that threshold is, I can’t say, but I would argue that if you can’t defend your work, investigate it’s own integrity, if you don’t know who your research assistants are or what they did, then you have likely crossed that thresold. From Gino’s (since updated) website:

We’ve all see the presentations or heard the stories of the leading scholar called on the carpet about something in their project or analysis, only to respond “I’m not sure. My RA did that.” Which is fine. But at some point that started to become assumed as characterizing whole researchers, whole agendas, whole fields. There are always going to be the prodigiously productive, but those people used to be one or two in a generation. Glorious anomalies. Universities are now littered with faculty with hundreds of publications, sometimes dozens in a single year, and we all know that it is physically impossible for them to conduct that work themselves. Gino received her PhD in 2004 and in the 19 years since has 460 (!!!) publications listed on google scholar. Some of those are probably duplicate listings, but it’s probably safe to say she has more than 20 publications per year for 20 years. It’s hard enough to imagine having energy enough to write and present that many papers even if they are produced entirely by others. This is not unique to Gino and there is no doubting the prodigious work ethic in evidence within her and others. What is in question is whether the ever raising bar on output is lowering the quality of work done by the field as a whole. It’s a tax on us all if research concentrated within the labor of the most qualified, competent, and creative no longer produces an acceptable return to scale. Some people really are better managers of other people’s work, at some point the work has to be attributable to one or more people. Who is doing the work? Who is responsible for the work?

Maybe this isn’t really useful and I don’t feel like yelling at clouds for 5000 words. As I was saying…

But I’ll tell you this- truly great researchers work with other greater researchers, employ smart people, mentor promising RAs. And they know who they are and what they did. Because when you’re in the weeds trying to answer questions, its almost impossible not to know. That doesn’t mean mistakes won’t be made and errors overlooked. But when it comes time to audit your work, you’ll know where to start and what might have gone wrong. If you don’t know, well, maybe you’re lying, but maybe more likely you just weren’t around when the work was getting done. You were promoting your last project and getting your next grant. Because you’re not a researcher. At least not anymore.

You’re a manager, promoter, figurehead, pitchman, traveling roadshow. You’re likely useful and valuable. Publication and Grant, LLC.

But you’re not a scholar. And the institutions employing you aren’t producing scholarship. These faculty are following their incentives, and those incentives are at the moment treating research as a game to be played. Not science. Not the answering of questions. An expensive hustle to grind and empty race to win. They’re getting what they’re paying (and tenuring) for.

The NFL has filed a grievance against the players union, alleging a conspiracy to fake injuries on the part of running backs to gain greater leverage in salary negotiations. To grant necessary context as succinctly as possible: running backs carry the ball while giant humans attempt to harm them. They do this 15 to 30 times per game. They are important to team success, but not as important as they once were. At the same time, they incur significant traumatic and cumulative damage, resulting in the shortest expected career length of any position in professional football. The NFL has a cap on total team salaries negotiated between the players union and the owners group/cartel/partnership. Running backs have seen their salaries decline even as the damage incurred as become more apparent and measurable. This raises an interesting question: where are the compensating wage differentials for risk? Everyone gets paid more if their job is dangerous. Do running back wages reflect their physical risk?

Supply and demand always come first, and any explanation for the (relative to other positions) decline in running backs salaries has to start with declining demand. Running backs are viewed as less valuable, more interchangable than they once were. At the margin, the returns to employing the best running back relative to the 30th best running back are viewed as thinner than in earlier eras. And that could be 95% of the answer, but it’s worth investigating the supply side as well.

The understood risk of injury facing running backs has increased. With greater risk typically comes less labor supply, the shifting equilibrium pushing wages up. Is this what we are seeing in football? Are fewer athletes interested in being a running back? Are running backs retiring earlier? Maybe, but that can cut both ways, reducing supply and demand.

But the supply side has multiple dimensions: both players entering the market (the “extensive” margin) and the amount they are willing to play (the “intensive” margin). Has the injury “threshold” shifted for running backs who are now less willing to play while already carrying significant damage? Because that’s exactly what I think we are seeing. I think running backs are beginning to reduce the amount of their bodies’ usable careers they are willing to sell at the current market price. They have reduced supply on the intensive margin. Running backs are demanding greater compensating wage differentials for risk and the owners don’t like it. They thought the supply of running back labor would remain almost perfectly inelastic under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, but they were wrong.

Now, is trying to organize a collective reduction in labor supply in order to better negotiate compensating wage differentials fair play on the part of the players? Absolutely. Why do I say absolutely? Because they are not only bargaining against a cartel of owners, they are implicitly bargaining against the rest of the players association, who have failed to deliver compensation for their risk, at least in part, because the rest of the players, the non-running backs, benefit from every dollar under the cap not spent on running back salaries.

I’ll put it bluntly. Everyone has the right not to supply their labor. Everyone has the right not to incur physical risk and damage if they aren’t being sufficiently compensated. Organizing to collectively restrict that supply is fair game, triply so if there are explicit (the owners) and implicit (the other players) groups that are collectively organizing against you.

I’ve seen NFL games. I know how much you’d have to pay me to carry the ball once on an NFL field, let alone dozens of times every week. If I wasn’t getting paid my reservation wage, there is no collective bargaining agreement you could wave in my face, no public shaming, no pressure from fans that could get me on that field.

All the collective bargaining in the world can’t make the laws of supply and demand go away. Professional sports are a labor-intensive industry, and football is a high risk endeavor for labor. If you want millionaires to show up every week to willingly endure the equivalent of a half-dozen car accidents, you’re going to have to pay them. Oh, but you can’t pay them that much, they’re a depreciating asset since the damage incurred shortens their career? Good point, the price just went up. You don’t want to commit to long term contracts because injury can end a career on any play? Good point, the price just went up. We have a big game this week, we need …you…to…ohhhhh

Now you’re getting it.