My problem is at the high school and college level. The kids are playing with great intensity for nothing more than love of the game and maybe the opportunity to move up. The long term risks seem way too high.
I'd say the same thing about kids playing soccer. I don't think heading the ball should be allowed in high school or college play. I was relieved when my daughter quit soccer.
OK. Where's the limit? That kind of protecting people from making their own decisions (including objectively bad ones) has always struck me as dystopian.
I think it's a good idea to educate people on the costs of their actions, and that we should find ways to impress on an emotional level how present actions will affect someone's future. I think it's a bad idea for society to make the decision for them, though.
It's not just a bad idea, it's totally immoral and unacceptable. Denying a person their agency is denying the very essence of what makes them human. It's no different than slavery in principle. Either you have self-ownership or not, there is no middle ground.
A single person without any family, can do everything he wants in their personal space. That will not harm anyone else. If they do that, earn a living and get famous, that will hurt their family and future generations too. That's why we need law and regulations.
Taking your example of sports: An organized league is something that an athlete joins by choice. The athlete agrees to abide by certain rules as a condition of participating in that league; they aren't being forced to give up their right to choice, they're choosing to.
The comment you responded to isn't arguing against laws and regulations, it's arguing against laws that take away agency for some reason besides protecting equal rights (e.g. someone's swinging fists aren't going to hit anyone else, but "we" don't like that, so we'll prohibit them from swinging their fists, because we feel it's for their own good).
Society shouldn't dictate what's good for the individual; the individual must.
There are many options to take a sensible position somewhere between the extremes.
Look up the meaning of "govern." It almost literally means "telling people what to do." You're a person. The government will tell you what to do with your business. That's it's only job. It's the sole reason it exists.
Nope. We should put adequate warnings on the cigarettes, so the customers know what exactly they are buying.
We should do the same with professional sports -- tell everyone the risk according to our best knowledge, and then let them decide.
That's the crux of the biggest issue. The NFL actively covered up/denied evidence that concussions were damaging for decades.
Yeah, and it's a pattern we've seen before (e.g. Big Tobacco).
I think it's a playbook. They string out the lies over a long period, then let the suspicion trickle out slowly. So, there are moments of muted outrage along the way, but by the time the full story comes out the pressure build-up has already been relieved. Beyond that, the finally-admitted truth is something we already knew for so long that our outrage has waned.
Basically, a PSYOP.
And fossil fuel
It's bad that they hid it, no doubt. But couldn't people reason that taking thousands of blows to the head over a career was not a smart idea?
e.g.: http://tobacco.stanford.edu/tobacco_main/images.php?token2=f...
Even if you were able to "reason" that smoking was bad, there was a whole dedicated culture jamming operation to push the message "you're wrong and foolish if you think smoking is bad" and it worked very well.
Every NFL team had (has?) a bunch of doctors telling players that they can shrug off concussions and other serious injuries, and a deeply-engrained (and specifically engineered) culture to back up that message.
Looking at them now, you can literally see the stiff arms sticking in the air that is a symptom of brain trauma, and people getting up concussed as fuck.
Hell, science still can't agree on if an egg is healthy or not. I eat them because I enjoy them and their are no obvious downsides. If there were some correlation that was known and proved unhealthy I might stop eating them. For example, while big tobacco was doing their thing... people knew their family members smoking were unhealthy, coughing like crazy, getting cancer/sick, so their was some clues in society telling you that you're probably being lied to. I have memories of this as a kid, "Joe died at 55 but, you know, he smoked 2 packs a day" was a valid way of thinking. So the health effects were widely known, just not in a measurable & undisputed scientific way.
The same thing goes for tobacco, NFL, climate change, ... all kinds of stuff. The anecdotal information around you says one thing, but the scientist can't agree and some of them are biased/being paid to say something regardless of truth. Years later the anecdotal information turns out to be true and people claim they were victims when really they could have just exercised some common sense.
You can't really leave it at that though. Most learning that people do is not independently driven, it is learning that complements teaching... which is never independent. Very rarely do people come to intelligent conclusions independently.
"Does football cause brain damage" is relevant to discussions of whether I should play football, whether my friends or family should play football, whether anyone should play football, whether it's ethical to watch football, whether it's more fun to watch football than golf, whether it's appropriate for educational institutions to promote or participate in football...
I'll also suggest that if it turned out that football promoted the better functioning of your brain, outrage at the NFL for covering up research suggesting the opposite would be pretty muted. If you believe that, you should also believe that what everyone sees as "the big issue" is the brain damage, not the coverup.
It was much more interesting to hear how much the NFL had covered up, and the degree to which they directly lied about the evidence of the effects of playing the game.
The cover-up is the scandalous part, so of course that's the part that people are going to focus on.
It's possible that you can't play football (or soccer) at a professional level without accepting that risk.
http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-expose-how-badly-nfl-p...
They're not actually protected in any way, because NFL contracts aren't guaranteed. Imagine what you would do if your doctor worked for your boss, and when your doctor asked if you were injured, telling the truth would allow your boss to fire you on the spot with zero compensation. Every time the subject comes up there's lots of whining by the NFL, but somehow the NBA, NHL, and MLB survived with essentially guaranteed contracts.
NFL players also don't actually have options. Scholarships are a joke and most of them learn virtually nothing. They started down the path to the NFL well before they were adults capable of making decisions, and by the time they're eligible for an NFL career, they typically don't have the academics to do much else. (Obviously there are exceptions, but Richard Sherman is not your average NFL player.)
Achieving this goal usually requires you to avoid serious brain damage. Repeated concussions and wisely living off the wealth you acquired in a few short years while still very young by managing it extraordinarily well for decades to come are probably mutually exclusive.
Still, medical coverage in the US generally sucks and I would hate to be saddled with medical bills following being a career athlete and no longer having the big NFL salary. I can't imagine it's happy fun times.
But this is not because they don't get enough money and more money would fix it (well, it it could be $trillions then maybe but it is never going to be that). It's because they don't have the right tools (widely understood) to manage their money properly, and their income structure is unlike income structure of many regular people (huge sums for very short period, then nothing - as opposed to much smaller sums over much longer period) and it requires very unobvious actions to make it work. If you have literally millions of dollars in your account, it's very hard not to buy some nice expensive things - even if you know you'd need those millions for decades to come, your brain doesn't really work this way. Some people manage it properly and create brands and side businesses for themselves or just live with reasonable expenses and are ok. Some spend too much and end up broke.
This "no experience managing a budget" stuff is hilarious, you don't need special knowledge not to blow millions. It is not hard. Let's call it what it is for most people - being trash, living extravagantly, and not thinking about the future. It's far more about character than about financial knowledge.
Still though, the median household income is in the $50ks. The 4% withdrawal rate means the base amount still grows with inflation, and so does your yearly withdrawal.
In other words, you can live a middle class life without ever working again. I would probably prefer to live a better lifestyle if that were an option. Sure, $1+ million isn't "fuck you" money, but it is "don't have to work ever again" money.
The median household income thing is also misleading. People earn much more with age. $30k is a good income for a 25-year old. It's in the bottom third for people above age 35. (It's even worse if you consider only college graduates, which NFL players almost all are.)
Are you sure about that? I was under the impression that they were all contractors.
Also worth noting the NFL has a 2:1 match up to $10k/yr. So every year you put $10k into your NFL 401k the NFL gives you $20k in tax free income.
A quick google search didn't give me a good indication of what the royalties are to low end pro athletes. I would not be surprised if the after tax on those is greater than the taxes on their traditional income.
I don't really see your point about $60k not getting you far at all since it's more than half the country makes. I understand you might have a more privileged view of what kind of lifestyle you expect to live, but you'd be doing better than half the country. You'll be fine.
So of course after 3 years of living like a monk you have $1.5 million stashed away...contrary to all rational expectations.
Well, less, because after income taxes and because as a young, invincible man among the best to play sports you spend money, maybe you have $300k left. If you're lucky.
But you're now unemployed, so you need healthcare. And the mortgage on your house is at least half that $60k/year because you're a young invincible sports hero.
You've been earning a half million dollars up to this point, so it's a safe bet it'll be very hard to scale your expenses down to $60k/year.
Anyway, I don't know where I'm going with this, except that your expectations of what an NFL player can/will do after being physically tortured for several years (high school, college, NFL) with hidden mental damage and having been a young, invincible man told you're the best of the best and surrounded by people eager to piggyback on your success...may be optimistic.
If you discount future earnings at 6% you get 1.8 millions for software engineering versus 2.67 million for NFL.
30 year treasuries pay roughly 3% before inflation.
Compare it to programmers who are pretty sure to get job once they finish school, have plenty of time for activities outside of programming and have much lower pressure on them either at the job (NFL equivalent) or while preparing for it.
2 - even at $1m/year, you may collect $550k after tax. Three years of that is not never work again money.
Three years of that is not never work again money.
It's not FU money, but as an emergency fall back it is obviously plausibly never work again money.
To your second point, there's a recent push to ban tackling at levels below high school football (and play flag football instead). The current theory is that it's not the big hits that cause brain damage, but all the smaller "sub-concussive" hits that happen on every play. Eliminating those until high school would hopefully limit the long-term damage of football, especially for kids who only play through high school or college. I don't think banning tackling at either of those levels is feasible, though; college football is a huge business itself, and a change as dramatic as eliminating tackling there would completely change the sport.
The American Flag Football League is one of the organizations trying to take over this space (they recently played a game in Levi's Stadium with Michael Vick and Terrell Owens, among others). Here are the full rules if you're interested! https://www.americanflag.football/official-rules/.
One of the arguments in the article is that not even for NFL players, at the highest level, are the consequences made obvious. Here's the last paragraph:
> But when all those big hits happened and the fans cheered, did they cheer in spite of knowing a man just greatly increased his risk for dementia? Was anyone worried about an A.L.S. diagnosis or a C.T.E.-related suicide at 40 after their favorite player suffered repeated blows to the head on the field? No, they cheered and they celebrated because they didn’t know. And neither did we.
A better solution would be weight limits and stricter controls on doping, not looser.
Your argument might hold water if most NFL players took up football after reaching adulthood. This seems highly unlikely to me.
In short, I think we should define the group by factors that result from choice, not outcome.
By comparison, a 4-year degree is probably worth more in the long-term than those NFL earnings. So the players are actually being better compensated in college than the NFL.
Edit:
The median salary for an NFL player is about $770K and most players are out of the league in under 3 years.
https://www.si.com/nfl/2016/03/01/nfl-careers-shortened-two-...
http://blog.futureadvisor.com/nfl-players-must-go-long-on-re...
On the other hand, engineering degrees tended to hover around $4M for average lifetime earnings, and some engineering fields (petroleum engineer, SV software engineer) averaged ~$6.5M in lifetime earnings.
I played field hockey in school & college. And once was involved in a head on collision with a friend, who suffered a bloody nose/face and was taken to hospital. And I was shit scared, until I knew he was safe, very luckily for me.
I have come to hate all sports like boxing/wrestling/soccer etc. for this reason. There are plenty of athletics and sports where you display your individual skill at a distance from another person to choose from.
I think, these sports are simply not probability friendly. When many people play, somebody is bound to get seriously injured.
If this is true, maybe an alternative to making the game more "safe" were to think about whether practically living for the sport for 20 years as part of a professional career makes sense.