Photo by Dan Mullan/Getty Images
Going to the games showed me that no one can put the feeling of the sporting event into a spreadsheet.
The most tempting column for an economist to write about the World Cup is the teardown, and I had it drafted before the opening match. The argument is simple: The benefits of hosting are oversold and the costs barely counted.
When the tournament last came to America in 1994, boosters promised host cities $4 billion in gains. Economists later reported up to $9.3 billion in losses. FIFA’s consultants projected this World Cup would add $17.2 billion to American gross domestic product. The receipts are still coming in—card spending jumped; restaurants and bars had their best months in years—but the national picture is what matters, and there the gains wash out against the tourists who stayed home and the jobs that never came. The economist Victor Matheson put it plainly: “The World Cup is making us happy. There’s not a lot of evidence it’s making us rich.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (Paywall)
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Roland G. Fryer, Jr., a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is Professor of Economics at Harvard University, an entrepreneur, and co-founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures.