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WNBA entered the room.
It was more than 2000 years ago when the Romans decided to pay athletes (gladiators) way more money than the average roman worker. This isn't a new thing.
Unions have been squashed for decades, they used to be 40% or so, now down to 10%.
People will blame Reagan, but let's be real they are trying to erase unions every day (and succeeding in USA).
BoTh PaRtIes are anti-union and pro-owner. Because they have the most money to "donate", there's no big conspiracy, just math. People who have no money don't contribute to political campaigns, yet free speech is money, or something.
Here's more of the bullshit about the parties being the same . . . https://news.gallup.com/poll/650147/democratic-party-seen-better-union-members.aspx
Pay attention to nuance . . . Even if the bus doesn't take you all the way to your destination -it's better to ride it than to have to walk by yourself.
Is there a point you can find in history where we paid doctors, teachers, and nurses close to what they're worth and more than professional athletes?
It sounds like you're nostalgic for a time that never existed.
There was definitely a time when professional athlete was hardly a career, and certainly not well paid. So for a time teachers and healthcare workers got paid more than athletes.
You really have to split it up. Teachers and nurses have always been paid pretty poorly. They were traditionally female only professions, and expected only to work until married or what not. Or they were nuns, and didn't get paid directly. Doctors of course, being traditionally male only got paid a lot better. But I agree that for most of human history, professional athletes were just rich peoples kids. They weren't even getting paid most likely. It would be interesting to try and figure out who the first true professional athlete was. Someone who wasn't born into money, and actually got paid a living wage.
Professors used to be paid the same as surgeons. Surgeon salaries kept up with inflation, professor salaries did not.
In the CFL (Canadian Football League) the players don’t make more than $100,000/yr generally, and the good ones get scooped up to the NFL.
OP is also only comparing top earners. For every athlete who earns millions, there's probably hundreds of athletes who make around median income or less - it's the kind of career where people will keep doing it even if it pays barely enough to pay the bills. There are a lot of doctors who make more than the poorer professional athletes, and doctors don't age out.
Is pretty meaningless to look at top earners.
Some specialist doctors are making a million dollars a year, but the average is closer to $375,000.
Much like musicians, there are huge numbers of "professional" athletes that are not making a living wage. The low end for medical doctors is plenty to survive.
I think it's distasteful when people complain about people earning six figures not getting as much as others, while we have people dying in the streets from capitalistic poverty.
Two words: Ronald Reagan.
Only it's the same in many other countries.
Ronald Regan is the same in many other countries?
I don’t know about athletes, but for us normies, it was the 1980’s with Reaganomics, early recession, rising inequality, “greed is good” culture, heightened Cold War tensions, the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and societal shifts towards consumerism. The 80’s was also a time of technological boom with computers, MTV, and cultural dynamism, with critiques often focusing on increased individualism, materialism, and social challenges.
A lot of jackass answers in here but this is the answer to the spirit of the question.
Reaganomics or it's other name "trickle down" economics is what you want to start looking into.
Adam Ruins Every….no wait. Reagan Ruined Evening.
jaunty whistle
I think the seeds may have been planted with the radio. Once athletes became celebrities it was only a matter of time. I know little about baseball, but even I know who Babe Ruth was, who played into the 1930s. TV blowing up in the 40s added an additional layer of connecting the names to the faces. This eventually gave way for MTV to come into the mix creating the beginnings of modern pop culture.
I’m not sure why OP or other comments are so hung up on the Athlete part? One of the most famous and wealthiest athletes of all time was a Roman charioteer. Gaius Appuleius Diocles was a celebrity across empires and predated doctors, Jesus and the radio. The only people that got paid more than Gaius were landowners/lords, which is still true to this day.
Around here most of the superintendents and principles at the schools are ex coaches. They spend education money on sports. They build huge facilities that only a fraction of the students get to access. All the while teachers spend their own money to ensure their kids have the bare minimum of supplies to learn. Its abhorrent.
Look up Ronald Reagan's administration.
lol
Was gonna say "IDK, but I am willing to bet it was during Reagan's presidency" and this is the first comment I see.
Why athletes? People attack athletes all the time and ignore that the team owners make $ with a B instead of an M. CEOs do far less for their organization than athletes and make far more money.
Many athletes also wreck their bodies and play with potential disability or death, while not gaining knowledge and experience for any other career, aside from coaching. And they have to retire at thirty-something at best. So having athletes presumes some kinda compensation for the rest of their lives and support for their family.
It's enough to see Muhammad Ali try to speak in interviews late in his career after he's been banged on the head too many times, to grok the tradeoff.
Then there are people like Brett Favre taking from the social safety net with the help of the government.
Was thinking about this in the context of a joke I heard in the late 90s:
What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.
We didn't we have jokes like that about the billionaires; at the time people were glazing Bill Gates. It's wild because billionaires are the ones writing the laws, lawyers just act it out.
Ridiculous pay for star athletes and celebrities is at least fair: they’re directly bringing in tons of money/profit, so why shouldn’t they be rewarded?
However they’re more a symptom than the actual problem. The real problem is the manipulative nature of sky high ticket prices, merchandising, ads, etc. how can these firms of entertainment command prices people can no longer afford, exploiting captive audiences, etc, to generate so much profit? The stars should get rewarded with a share of the profits they generate, but it’s ridiculous how much those activities generate.
In a sane world, I could afford to take my family to a game/concert/theme park, we can decide to bring in our own water, food and t-shirts only cost a little more than in the outside world, there are no ad timeouts, no region locking, no public funding, and the owners should be taxed at a higher rate than I am. But at every step, we’ve adopted anti-consumer policy, increased inequality, and it just adds up - society rewards exploitation, removes consumer protections and fairness. We’re no longer people, just products
Ridiculous pay for star athletes and celebrities is at least fair
Put another way, we as a society actually do spend wayyy more money on doctors, nurses, and teachers. It's just that there are many millions of people who have to split that pot of money, whereas for pro athletes there are only a few dozen or a few hundred to split that comparably smaller pot of money with.
I might have the same favorite NBA player as literally millions of people in this country. I for sure don't have the same favorite doctor or favorite teacher, though.
So if a genie showed up and said "give $1 to your favorite celebrity and give $100 to your favorite teacher," we as a society would give way more money to the teachers, but each individual teacher would receive less than each individual celebrity who gets paid under this system.
That’s a really good point!
It's interesting to look at how much money the players make in different sports, as a percentage of total sport revenue.
In the EPL (English soccer) you can find it broken down by team, with most of the top teams around 50%–70%, and league-wide they average 71%.
The IPL (Indian T20 cricket) on the other hand, players earn just 18% in the poorest teams (and even worse in the top teams).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket/2023/03/29/think-ipl-players-paid-should-paid-three-times/
The NBA (American basketball) gives about 50% (though WNBA is single-digits), NFL (gridiron football) is at 48%, and NHL (hockey) is 50%.
The NRL (Australian rugby league) is less than 30% or around 41%, depending on which source you look at, and the AFL (Aussie rules football) is at around 32%.
This is a pretty one-dimensional look at it, ignoring for example if, say, Aston Villa (which is at 96%, apparently) achieves such a fair looking score by paying a single superstar rather than fairly distributing it across their players. But it's at least a start.
I don't think doctors fit in that group. They are paid well, and respected, far more than nurses on both accounts.
Obligatory reminder that highest paid athlete in(western) history is Gaius Appuleius Diocles a Byzantine era Chariotter.
Complaining about athletes just makes it sound petty. Athletes are just employees, if you're going to complain, complain about the athletes' and nurses' employers. Rich people never gave a flying fuck about their employees, and underfunded schools are a feature for them, too.
And the overwhelming majority of athletes do not earn well. It's only the top 1% that gets rich, and only those in sports with a lot of public appeal.