Book Report

I recently read two books which struck me as books that are for me.

1. Soccernomics: This book used economic analysis to analyze soccer.  I enjoy sports, and having double-majored in economics, I enjoy rudimentary economic analysis.  Here are a few (but not all) interesting points the book makes:
• Soccer (really professional sports as a whole) is a poorly-run business.  For example, a team will fire its coach after one bad season and then hire a new coach within a couple weeks.  In the real world, companies spend months interviewing candidates for a high-level position.
• Soccer is so popular around the world because when the English introduced it to many of their colonies.  American football, on the other hand, is not something which the United States has been too keen to export.  Americans seem content to like football without caring what the rest of the world thinks of it.
• Having a professional team does not benefit a city's economy.  It does, however, increase the level of happiness of its citizens in a statistically significant way.  Further, this as well as having large international sporting competitions in which ones country is a participants is shown to decrease suicide rates.  This subject reminded me of my childhood basketball team, the Seattle SuperSonics, who moved away from Seattle, in part, because the city did not want to pay to build them a new arena.  The point I took away in relation to the Sonics was that although the team would not make up the arena money by stimulating economic activity, having the team was a benefit to the community in a significant way.

2. Eating the Dinosaur: It is hard for me to describe exactly what this book was about.  It talked a lot about popular culture.  It referenced a lot of things in which I am interested—for example, the podcast This American Life, the TV show Friday Night Lights, basketball, football, music, etc.  It talked about some things that I hadn't really thought hard about—for example, what is the deal with laugh tracks?  It generally looked at things in an interesting way.  I would recommend this book to those who have some of the same tastes as I do.