Crazy Sports Salaries Prove Supply and Demand Works

Sports fans love to grouse about athletes' salaries and bemoan the ever-rising prices of tickets, concessions, and merchandise. But “it isn’t some vague indefinable ‘they’ who pays the players,” writes Allen Barra for the Wall Street Journal. “It’s you, or rather, it’s us.” Owners set prices they think fans will pay, and "if you are willing to pay their prices that means they set the right prices after all."

Barra cites baseball Yoda Bill James, who argues that ballplayers make more than medical researchers because “we are, as a nation, far more interested in having good baseball teams than we are in finding a cure for cancer.” If we donated money to cancer research first, then bought tickets with what was left over, Barra writes, "athletes and rock stars will actually be paid what we pretend they should be paid."