Amazing Title

The most tempting column for an economist to write about the World Cup is the teardown, and I had it drafted before the opening match. The argument is simple: The benefits of hosting are oversold and the costs barely counted.

When the tournament last came to America in 1994, boosters promised host cities $4 billion in gains. Economists later reported up to $9.3 billion in losses. FIFA’s consultants projected this World Cup would add $17.2 billion to American gross domestic product. The receipts are still coming in—card spending jumped; restaurants and bars had their best months in years—but the national picture is what matters, and there the gains wash out against the tourists who stayed home and the jobs that never came. The economist Victor Matheson put it plainly:

“The World Cup is making us happy. There’s not a lot of evidence it’s making us rich.”

Imaginary opportunity costs:

• "Closing the racial-achievement gap in math is achievable with targeted investments of approximately $1,700 a child each year over a three-year period."

lol, good luck dreaming up that ability, let alone such a cheap figure.

"to get to the truth, I have to leave my bubble for the real world. When I was reforming public schools I sat in them every week. So I went to a match with my family and friends—Norway vs. Iraq—to see the traffic and overpriced hot dogs for myself."

If two peoples could meet like this before their governments narrated them to each other, might peace have a little more room to work?
Borders don’t dissolve because a stadium sang together, and no treaty was signed in Foxborough, Mass., that night. But governments answer, eventually, to publics—and a public that has stood shoulder to shoulder with the people it was taught to fear is harder to march to war.

beautiful.

"Multiply that man by a stadium, then every stadium, across 39 days, and you start to see what the typical economic analysis was never built to count."

America’s two decades in Iraq and the war on terror cost somewhere between $2 trillion and $8 trillion, depending on who’s counting. If everything we just witnessed made one such war 0.2% less likely, FIFA’s $17.2 billion is the smaller number.

It won't, because warmongering adventurism is decided by faraway fuckheads in government offices, not man-on-the-street Americans.

I went to my first World Cup to price it—to see if the benefits were oversold. They are. But that measures the wrong thing. The real return isn’t in hotel occupancy or pounds of ribs sold; it’s in the 90 minutes when 40 million Iraqis narrowed to one—a man weeping over a goal that meant nothing and everything.

archive. https://archive.md/rRa47