College Football is Big Business

Pity the college football coach. With all those talented student-athletes, how much energy and time should he spend on the student versus the athlete?

For any coach at the 120 universities playing big-time football, the choice is easy if he does what the school’s contract rewards.Contracts specify “performance-based” bonuses, and so we examined coaches’ contracts to answer the question: How do football coaches’ rewards for winning games, attending to the athlete, compare with their rewards for advancing the student toward graduation? There’s no contest.

No one is surprised when a corporation talks about its devotion to the social good but then pays its CEO bonuses for raising profits. Likewise, it should be no surprise that despite talk about education, coaches are paid to win games. But it may be surprising how clear the contracts are in specifying what it takes for a coach to get bonuses.

Press on, brave librarians!

We love librarians. My next-door colleague is on the phone with them all the time. According to an article in The New York Times, during this recession, libraries and librarians are now dealing with issues that weren’t exactly in their initial job description. Not only that, but their budgets are almost certainly being cut.

A view of 1872 America through Japanese eyes

In 1872 Oakand, California, the Japanese Iwakura Embassy toured a winery. The embassy was established as one of Japan’s first formal contacts with the industrial west, and used to learn about new ways to develop industry and commerce.
As we see in diarist Kunitake Kume’s breakdown of wine economics, some things ring very true today.
That’s right [...]

Richard Bronk on BBC Forum

The Romantic Economist Richard Bronk chats with James Lovelock and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, on BBC’s The Forum. Bronk even provides the weekly 60 second idea to change the world. Bronk’s advice?
take heed of the traditional Greek dictum ‘moderation in all things, nothing in excess’. These words were carved on the temple of Apollo [...]

New York: finance capital for long?

Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) wrote an interesting long piece in The Atlantic focusing on the shocks to urban areas as high finance crumbles. Will the big job losses mean that the center of gravity in the financial world shifts elsewhere?
For Dr. Florida, probably not. He cites Cambridge author Yousef Cassis and [...]