L'Information est d'Or

I just finished reading the fascinating book "SOCCERNOMICS: why England loses, why Spain, Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey - and even Iraq - are destined to become the kings of the World's most popular sport" . It is the first time I ever read anything interesting about football! The authors, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, are two economists interested in sports and they enjoy to apply - in sometimes an unconventional and surprising way - their economist's tools and reasoning to sports. Using plenty of data, they try to answer the following questions: Why do clubs have so much debt? Is a club a business? How efficient is the transfer market? Should we regulate more the sports markets? aka limit debt, share the revenues more equally among clubs Is it worth hosting a major sports event like the World Cup or the Olympics? How to shoot a penalty? What does the rise and decrease of some clubs tell us? Rather t...

“The Company of Strangers” (2004, Princeton University Press) In a very rich and lively book, Paul Seabright, an economist from the University of Toulouse, explains how human beings have evolved from an ordinary animal species to a highly organised society through what he calls “The Great Experiment”. This experiment consists in the building of social and economic institutions and Seabright shows that our subsequent evolution has little to do with genetical or biological evolution. These institutions – mostly embedded in the modern state via some core principles: army, law enforcement, property rights,… - have made it possible the development of markets by nurturing trust and allowing specialisation. Trust and specialisation are linked to each other because one cannot specialize in what she does best if she doesn’t trust that others will provide her with everything else she needs to live. Specialisation has grown to such a high level that the manufacturing and delivery of a new shi...