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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thought though. Why do NFL players get paid so much? Where's the money actually coming from? I don't know too much about this industry but it seems their NFL salaries come from ticket sales and TV licensing deals, and the TV companies can pay them because of advertisements, which they can sell because people watch football thus tv thus ads.

Must be why NFL, NBA etc get so fuckin salty when people upload highlight reels and stuff to youtube.

I can't think of anyway to similarly monetize teaching and I really don't think anybody should go down that route, it sounds terrifying. But how do you convince a bunch of people watching football, which kinda costs them either nothing or like 90$ a month for their cable subscription, that they should also spend a % of their income on teachers?

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> Why do NFL players get paid so much?

Because their labor can be very cheaply duplicated by broadcasting the game to millions of spectators.

*> Where's the money actually coming from?

Ads, merchandising, and ticket sales, like you note.

Professional sports players are, economically, in the same category as musicians and actors. They produce media and the digital era means media can be duplicated at virtually no cost, so the value of their labor can be easily multiplied by a very large constant.

Police, doctors, and teachers provide their labor to individual humans in realspace which is much harder to scale so, unfortunately, their salaries reflect that.

Maybe teachers can scale with technology? Maybe we see some of this with online courses, MOOC's? If that were monetized in a way to give the proceeds directly to the teacher maybe that could work? Although some teaching does not lend itself well to that environment, in some cases classrooms and 1 on 1 interaction is something that cannot be substituted.

I agree for all the examples you give, there's nothing clear like there is for athletes and artists.

>Must be why NFL, NBA etc get so fuckin salty when people upload highlight reels and stuff to youtube.

For what it's worth NBA has actually taken the opposite stance from the other leagues in terms of highlights online. See https://www.businessinsider.com/adam-silver-nba-ok-highlight...

Yes that's right, that's what I meant by me contributing in some way, via ticket sales, merchandise, it all adds up to some athletes being mega millionaires. Although nowadays the big stars have lots of advertising deals and make big $$ outside of their regular paycheck also.

I don't know how to fix the teacher's pay. It's just unfortunate that by comparison they make pennies.

If we can pass 718B for the military then we can afford to pay teachers more.

Without even a cent in extra tax.

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