Economist: The Olympics and the Global Labor Market

My primary offline source of news is The Economist, a favorite I picked up in high school as a member of my school’s Model United Nations team. The consistently libertarian magazine is great for a number of reasons. Its articles tend to be really global in their news coverage, a little less sensitive to the whims of the news cycle, and there is a great deal of general reference information in each article. It has a very simple pattern that almost every article follows: 1) Headline, usually with stupid pun attached 2) Sub-headline which states the main point of the article or the magazine’s position 3) 1/3 to 1/2 of the main body of the article’s text states the issue’s background and argument against the magazine’s position and 4) the article then disagrees with the position stated in (3) and argues its super libertarian position.

This makes it very easy to get lots of basic background info as well as something on the various positions in the issue at stake. If you are pro-welfare, culturally conservative, nationalistic, protectionist, or in any way deeply distrustful of capitalistic market forces, you will probably find yourself agreeing with every article’s first third. The rest of the article will give you most of what you need to “know the enemy” as it were. The magazine has its downsides such as a lack of really cutting edge up to date info from the field and a deep arrogance about its own positions (the magazine often talks to political leaders as if its every issue were in direct conversation with them), but I haven’t found anything better for the amount of detail and analysis it provides.

Now it just so happens that, given my particular political persuasion, I find myself in agreement with The Economist about one half of the time. So what exactly is this “persuasion” in conventional (and thus often misleading) terms? On most social issues, I’m usually somewhere well off the edges of society’s peripheral vision to the left flank. On economic issues related to education and health, I’m something of a moderate “liberal” but when it comes to issues related to global labor markets and globalization in general, I’m kind of irrationally free market. I only say irrational because despite not being that well read on the details of the arguments involved, I will tend to support globalization and the most radically free market positions on the free movement of migrants and labor across borders. In this respect I feel the same kind of frustration Matthew Haughey expresses in his recent posting on Globalism or Nationalism.

I was delighted when The Economist has an article like it did this week (p47 of the print issue) on the Olympics.

…When the games were revived…modern nationalism was on the rise in Europe. Poeple thought history was made, and states were built, by well-defined, hermetically sealed ‘nations’ with a supreme claim on their subjects’ loyalty. No wonder, then, that the modern games became a contest not among athletes [as in ancient Greece] but between countries. Over the course of the 20th century, as the whole world caught nation-state fever, having a fine Olympic team became as important a symbol for newly formed countries as a flag, an anthem, an airline and a big embassy in a leafy district of Washington, D.C.

…[The article goes on to note how the global labor market has led to states buying athletes for their national teams and offering them citizenship]…

But in a world where multinational corporations sponsor the games, why shouldn’t there be multinational athletes? Probably because cheering one’s flag is still one of the event’s main selling points, and a free market in athletes would endanger the national pride that still underlies the event’s commercial success. ‘The money depends on the audience, and the audience depends on symbolisms, which often include nationalism,’ says Laurence Chalip…
Kevin Wamsley…says…’It might be better for sport if people stopped cheering for nations and cheered for individuals, but that’s not what the Olympics have been built on.”