What’s a men’s Olympic hockey gold medal worth to you? Not: How much would you pay for the physical medal if it were for sale on eBay? But rather: It’s the third period, the game is tied, how much would you pay to have Canada win?
It’s obviously hard to put this kind of thing into dollars and cents (assuming we still had cents), but I bet lots of Canadians would pay $10 or $15 or even more to have our favourite team win. Add up all those loonies, and a victory creates a national benefit in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The highs that followed our team’s wins in 2010 and this year in Sochi were priceless, of course, but if they had been priced, they would have been worth a lot.
Economists call something like an Olympic win a “public good” and contrast it with “private goods.” The classic private good is a hamburger. If I eat a hamburger, you don’t get the hamburger. Moreover, people can go into the hamburger business and sell hamburgers to people who want them and not sell them to people who don’t want them.
With a “public good,” by contrast, my consuming it doesn’t reduce the benefit — in the case of the hockey gold medal, the joy — you get from it. It’s a hockey victory for both of us, for all 35 million of us, in fact. But it’s not something you can easily trade in a market. I could donate to Team Canada, but I could just as easily not donate and still enjoy the victory. With a hamburger, by contrast, if I don’t pay, I don’t get it.
When goods are public, economists argue that markets might fail to provide enough of them. We’d all like to have more, but we’d all prefer that the other guy pay. One solution to this “free-rider” problem is to buy them with tax revenues and use the police power of the state to punish those who don’t pay their taxes.
Public goods might come to be provided in other ways, however. Professional hockey players might donate their time and risk injury, as they do, for the honour of playing for their country. Or businesses might provide funding in exchange for official sponsor status and lots of reflected glory if the team does well. (Any resulting boost to their bottom line would be “gilt by association,” you might say.)
Which brings us to soccer. Canada won gold in men’s soccer in the 1904 Olympics, but since then has languished. We did qualify for the World Cup in 1986 but lost our three first-round games without scoring a goal. We are 110th on FIFA’s world ranking and just last month ended a 958-minute scoreless streak. In effect, we are the (men’s) soccer equivalent of the Jamaican bobsled team, though without their charm.
Does it bother you that we don’t have a team in Brazil? How much would you be willing to pay to see us have a team, maybe even one that scored a goal? I’m guessing that for most Canadians the answer would be: “Not much.” New Canadians seem content rooting for their native countries’ teams. Old Canadians don’t really care much about soccer.
Of course, all that might change if we had a team that did better, which we might have if we put a lot more money into elite-level soccer. We’d be paying professional players and coaches to get better at their professions, so, eventually, for a month every four years we could feel better about ourselves.
There are much better things to do with public funds, including leaving them with the people who earned them. The world can keep its “beautiful game.” We’ll stick to our magnificent game, with its speed, hitting, shining white ice and penalties, not penalty kicks, for embellishers.
William Watson teaches economics at McGill University in Montreal.
