Date: Thu, 5 Dec 1996 12:15:12 +1030
From: MO-AT-pseud.pseud
Subject: RE: M-INTRO: professional athletes



>
>I do not see how athletes are getting exploited.  If athletes could make
>more money without serving capitalists, they would.  The fact that they
>serve capitalists means that capitalists are offering them an opportunity
>that they perceive to be better than any alternative, and means that they
>recognize that they need capitalists in order to contribute what value they do.
>
Well. from the fact that athletes see no better opportunity, it does not
follow that they are not being exploited. A rich man who offers a mother
money for a life- saving operation for her son in exchange for sex is
clearly exploiting the mother's need to do something for her son. This may
still be her best option (the problem here, of course, is that her
opportunities for medical treatment for her son are not what they ought to
be and the rich man is taking advanatge of her situation rather than
offering to help - this example has been discussed by philosophers but it
could only arise in a society which makes no public provision for people's
health - hence it has been initially cited and discussed by US philosophers
).

Having said this, there is no reason to expect that athletes are being
exploited in the Marxian sense at least if they do have reasonable
alternatives to the offers made by capitalists. The athletes are trading
services for money and may be doing nicely. They are not in the position of
workers who are employees but in the same position as other professionals
who offer services. If there were a monopoly of purchasers of such services
(a situation of monopsony) services, the atheletes might be exploited but
there is no such monopoly in fact. On the whole athletes do quite nicely
out of trading with advertisers.


>I disagree that there are any losers in this type of situation.  If the one
>who bought the doll for $15 could have bought it from the one who sold it
>for $10, he would have. The fact that he didn't means that the middleman
>created value by making possible the transfer of the doll to the one who
>valued it more, and he deserves to be paid accordingly.  Unless the buyer
>and/or the seller misperceived what value the doll was to themselves, at
>least $5 in value was created by the transfer, since the seller considered
>the doll to be worth less than $10 to him, and the buyer considered it to be
>worth more than $15 to him.
>
Well, there can be losers in this situation. The middleman may restrict the
information available to buyers and sellers. The middleman does not add
value to the product but provides transport and information services. the
middleman may have a relative monopoly on such services and so may extract
more than a middleman could in a competitive market for such services. The
value of the services provided by the middleman may be $5 but may not be.

In using orthodox economic theory, one has to be aware that the model used
abstracts from factors which influence prices, such as a lack of
information, power, etc. Neo-classical economics really only says how
preferences and scarcities impact on prices given that there are complete
markets for all factors. Other things, such as the power relations,
incomplete markets for risks, and so on are abstracted from.




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