Jonathan Chait's Passion for College Football Is Leading Him to
Talk Nonsense  A blog about business and economics. Aug. 28 2013
11:32 AM  Jonathan Chait's Passion for College Football Is
Leading Him to Talk Nonsense    The guy in the suit is getting
paid.  Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images  The NCAA performs
many functions in the world of college sports. One of those
functions is to promulgate rules limiting the ways in which
schools can compensate athletes. That's textbook carteling
behavior in which a conspiracy of employers groups together to
depress wages. But Jonathan Chait says this framing is all wrong
and we shouldn't see college football and basketball players as
exploited workers. I'm having a little bit of trouble
understanding his argument, but as best I can see, it consists
of two related points. One is that colleges can't exploit
because they're not for-profit business enterprises. The other
is that NCAA sports in the aggregate cannot be exploitative
because schools use the economic surplus