More $1 million lottery winners each year than NBA players since 1990 that have career earnings over $1 million

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I’ve written before about using the average vs. the median salary in the NBA lockout discussions and here is some more fuel to add to the fire: there are more $1 million lottery winners each year than NBA players who since 1990 have had career earnings of more than $1 million.

I want to call foul on the mainstream media. As I mentioned, a majority of the players in the league make less than $2 million, and yet people like Stephen A. Smith throw around that $5 million figure as gospel. We keep hearing the NBA lockout being described as “millionaires versus billionaires”. But most NBA players won’t become big earners like Kobe and LeBron. Here’s a fun breakdown:

Since the 1990-1991 season 1461 players have entered the NBA and of those:

  • 490 — or 33% — never earned $1 million in career earnings*
  • and that means… 971 have earned at least $1 million in career earnings*
  • 752 have averaged a salary of at least $1 million per year*
  • 643 have earned at least $5 million in career earnings*
  • 165 averaged a salary of at least $5 million per year*

As we can see, less than half of all NBA players in the last 20 years — the period of time where NBA salaries have been at their highest — have hit that $5 million mark over their entire careers. Just over one third — 33% — of all NBA players in the last 20 years have not even hit the $1 million mark in career earnings. And these numbers have been adjusted for inflation!

Here’s a fun comparison: on average, 1600 people win a lottery of at least $1 million every year! That’s right; the lottery has produced almost twice as many millionaires in the last year as the NBA has in the last twenty years!  The popular perception is that once a player enters the NBA they will earn millions and millions of dollars. The truth is that many players don’t hit that high mark.

Both events, winning the big lottery jackpot and becoming a NBA player, are statistically unlikely. However, I suspect that most Americans would say that winning the lottery is much more unlikely. But this blog post points out that even when players do make it to the NBA, a third don’t rake in the big career earnings associated with professional athletes (measured here as $1 million).

This would make for an interesting discussion starter for any professional athlete’s union: should the union be more concerned with allowing a smaller percentage of the athletes maximize their salaries or be more interested in guaranteeing a baseline for the majority of the league that are not stars?

The lottery figures themselves are interesting:

According to the TLC television show, “The Lottery Changed My Life,” more than 1600 new lottery millionaires are created each year. That doesn’t include people that have won jackpots of, say, $100,000 because than the number would be much higher. Still, 1600 is quite a high number.

If 1600 win at least a million in the lotto every year, it means that there are more than 130 each month, more than 30 each week, and more than 4 each day. That’s a lot of winners.

It would be interesting to see more documentation on this.

KPBS San Diego on Proposition 13

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The great property tax revolt of 1978 in California has had a big impact on American politics. KPBS in San Diego put together a number of reports on the history and legacy of Prop 13. You can also find a number of other interesting videos if you search YouTube. The Wikipedia entry gives a decent overview.

When I showed one clip to my American Suburbanization class, I was struck again by how much of the rhetoric from both sides matches current political discussions: a desire to cut lard from the government and save the middle class versus providing needed money for social services and asking people to pay their fair share. This is an issue that still hasn’t been decided and is particularly pertinent today in an era of budget shortfalls.

Facebook also building profiles for non-users?

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A complaint recently filed in Ireland alleges that Facebook is collecting information about non-users:

Eight hundred million users are not enough. Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, is now building profiles of non-users who haven’t even signed up, an international privacy watchdog charges.

The sensational claim is made in a complaint filed in August by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner. It alleges that users are encouraged to hand over the personal data of other people — including names, phone numbers, email addresses and more — which Facebook is using to create…

European law carries heavy penalties for companies that violate “information privacy” laws — in contrast to the relatively lax U.S. laws. But the U.S. has issues with Facebook as well: Privacy rights litigation is proceeding in Mississippi, Louisiana, Kansas and Kentucky. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also probing complaints about Palo Alto-based Facebook, while Congress is calling for an inquiry.

Kubasta noted that — for better or for worse — Facebook’s best defense may be a good offense. After all, it’s not alone: Several other websites are undertaking this kind of tracking as well.

“Regardless of what Facebook is doing, many websites collect and propagate personally identifiable information about individuals who have not entered into any agreement with the website. Just a few examples include Spokeo, iSearch, WhitePages.com,” Kubasta told FoxNews.com.

Three quick thoughts:

1. Doesn’t it really depend on what Facebook actually does with this data? If other companies are also doing this, what is so insidious about Facebook doing it? Is Facebook held to a different standard because people voluntarily give their information to them?

2. This sounds like it could have some interesting legal ramifications as companies have to comply with both European and American regulations.

3. I’ve said this before: if you are really worried about your information being collected anywhere on the Internet, the best solution is to not use the Internet at all.

“The Sociology of Professional Wrestling” course

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Even as news about the Sociology of Jay-Z course at Georgetown continues to spread, I ran into news about a sociology course about professional wrestling:

On Oct. 16, professional wrestling came to Brock University with the third annual “Brock Brawl”. The live pro wrestling event not only served as entertainment for members of the Brock community, it also represented a learning experience for students at Brock enrolled in the SOCI 3P55 course, also known as, “The Sociology of Professional Wrestling”.

Daniel Glenday, a Professor in the Department of Sociology, teaches Sociology (SOCI) 3P55 at Brock, which is the only course offered in North America that purely focuses on pro wrestling.

“The idea of this course is to ‘wise people up’ to wrestling,” said Glenday. “It’s a big part of cultures all around the world, but no one is studying it. It’s everywhere, so we should really take a look at what it means.”…

The Sociology of Professional Wrestling was first offered at Brock in 2006. Glenday said the course addresses the misunderstandings and prejudices people have towards pro wrestling, which has been criticized for its “excessive violence, sexism, homophobia and ethnic/racial stereotyping”. Glenday also hopes to dismiss the argument that pro wrestling leads to an increase in bullying by younger girls and boys.

I assume there would a lot of material to work with in this course regarding masculinity, violence, and popular culture.

Is professional wrestling still popular? I know it is still on the air but I haven’t seen many commercials for it or heard about it leaking out into the popular culture. One website suggests the October 10th Monday Night Raw pulled down a rating of 3.2 and the latest “Impact Wrestling” (Thu Oct 13) had a 0.5 rating (better than “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report”). Perhaps I am in the wrong target demographic and/or am not watching the right channels.

“The Steve Jobs Anti-Eulogy” raises some interesting points

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Now that the media blitz following the death of Steve Jobs has slowed, there is more space to consider the coverage. Here are five interesting observations from one writer who also wins points for invoking “Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer” and Malcolm Gladwell:

1. People write about Steve to write about themselves…

2. Individuals do not make history. Populations do…

So the idea that Steve Jobs changed history is just plain bad analysis. Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer argued that attributing historical events to the decisions of individuals was a hopelessly primitive, childish, and unscientific position. After he published these views in The Study of Sociology, the case was closed. At least for professional historians.

3. You can tell a lot about a society by the people they honor…

4. Steve Jobs sheds more light on the nature vs. nurture debate than he does on the history debate…

5. Espousing the glories of genius gets us nowhere.

What I like the most about these is that they try to place Jobs within his context. They also raise larger questions including “what does it mean to be a genius,” “what values does society promote,” and “are societal or group trends more important than individual actions.”

Why paying off all of the American debt in the early 2000s might have caused problems

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Many people would suggest that the United States needs to tackle its growing debt problem. But a government report from the early 2000s suggests that paying off all the debt could have some negative consequences:

If the U.S. paid off its debt there would be no more U.S. Treasury bonds in the world…

But the U.S. has been issuing bonds for so long, and the bonds are seen as so safe, that much of the world has come to depend on them. The U.S. Treasury bond is a pillar of the global economy.

Banks buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth, because they’re a safe place to park money.

Mortgage rates are tied to the interest rate on U.S. treasury bonds.

The Federal Reserve — our central bank — buys and sells Treasury bonds all the time, in an effort to keep the economy on track.

If Treasury bonds disappeared, would the world unravel? Would it adjust somehow?

“I probably thought about this piece easily 16 hours a day, and it took me a long time to even start writing it,” says Jason Seligman, the economist who wrote most of the report…

In the end, Seligman concluded it was a good idea to pay down the debt — but not to pay it off entirely.

So which party or movement would support this? Would it be best to have a more flexible debt (small to large depending on the more immediate economic circumstances) or would it be better to have a more stable, small amount of debt?

I don’t know the intricacies of how this might all play out but it is a reminder of the globalization of finance: doing something that might be viewed as desirable in the United States would not only affect other sectors of American life but how other countries can operate. It would be interesting to know how we got to this point. Does every major country basically have some debt that other countries are counting on?

Senate proposal to reward immigrants who would buy $500k in housing

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The down housing market is leading to some interesting ideas including one from two Senators which involves rewarding immigrants who are willing to buy expensive homes:

The reeling housing market has come to this: To shore it up, two Senators are preparing to introduce a bipartisan bill Thursday that would give residence visas to foreigners who spend at least $500,000 to buy houses in the U.S.

The provision is part of a larger package of immigration measures, co-authored by Sens. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah), designed to spur more foreign investment in the U.S.

Foreigners have accounted for a growing share of home purchases in South Florida, Southern California, Arizona and other hard-hit markets. Chinese and Canadian buyers, among others, are taking advantage not only of big declines in U.S. home prices and reduced competition from Americans but also of favorable foreign exchange rates.

To fuel this demand, the proposed measure would offer visas to any foreigner making a cash investment of at least $500,000 on residential real-estate—a single-family house, condo or townhouse. Applicants can spend the entire amount on one house or spend as little as $250,000 on a residence and invest the rest in other residential real estate, which can be rented out…

International buyers accounted for around $82 billion in U.S. residential real-estate sales for the year ending in March, up from $66 billion during the previous year period, according to data from the National Association of Realtors. Foreign buyers accounted for at least 5.5% of all home sales in Miami and 4.3% of Phoenix home sales during the month of July, according to MDA DataQuick.

This seems like it would be part of a discernible shift in the immigration conversation: primarily letting rich or educated immigrants into the United States.

The real question: does this really help the housing market? What kind of impact are we talking about – a 1% boost, 10% boost? As the article suggests, wealthy foreigners are already buying property in other countries. I’ve highlighted a couple of stories where wealthy Chinese buyers have purchased homes in New Zealand and Vancouver, Canada. When this happens, locals have mixed reactions. Would this proposed policy simply promote more foreign investment or would it push people to actually move to the United States and work here?

Would this bill also only help more wealthy areas, such as big cities or coastal/vacation regions? Would this primarily benefit people with bigger, more expensive homes?

Conservatives getting behind mortgage modifications?

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A journalist argues that conservatives are starting to argue that the federal government should step in and help homeowners stay in their homes:

Mortgage modifications have been a key pillar of the progressive response to the economic downturn–and they’ve been one focus of the Occupy protests that have sprung up across the country lately. The Obama administration offered its own such program in 2009, though it has helped far fewer homeowners than anticipated, thanks to a flawed design. But until lately, conservatives had by and large opposed the idea, arguing, as Santelli did, that taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for borrowers’ bad decisions, and that banks shouldn’t have their actions constrained by government.

So what’s changed? By and large, policy hands and political leaders alike recognize that the economy isn’t going to get better on its own, at least not any time soon,. There’s a widespread consensus that until the United States tackles the massive overhang of housing debt–American homeowners’ wealth has fallen by a stunning 40 percent since 2006–the economic recovery won’t gain steam. As Feldstein wrote: “The fall in house prices is not just a decline in wealth but a decline that depresses consumer spending, making the economy weaker and the loss of jobs much greater.” Rogoff, too, views the crushing volume of personal debt as an unaffordable drag on growth. “Simply put, you can’t operate an economy where huge numbers of people are desperately in debt and have no real way out,” he argues.

Hubbard originally offered a modification plan in 2010 as a way to avoid another “costly stimulus package” designed to spur consumer demand. But he, too, may also recognize that mortgage modification, though necessary for the health of the economy, is likely to be politically unpopular. If so, better to have President Obama take the hit, rather than a future Republican president—like, say, President Romney.

Of course, right and left don’t see entirely eye-to-eye on the issue. Dean Baker, an economist with the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, last week slammed Feldstein’s plan as too soft on banks and a bad deal for struggling homeowners. And it’s hard to imagine that Republicans in Congress would react favorably to an aggressive mortgage modification proposal from the Obama administration.

So if this is true – and “three instances” doesn’t a trend make even as this journalist suggests – what is happening?

1. Conservatives are recognizing that the mortgage debt is holding up the larger economic recovery. If people can’t move, they can’t go to the open jobs. The debt doesn’t allow them to spend on other consumer items. If government involvement can move people past this logjam, then the “free market” can work again. Desperate times mean that political ideology has to be bent a little.

2. As the journalist suggests, they only back this when a Democrat is in charge.

3. This is pandering for votes. American culture has a dream of homeownership – neither party wants to be against that.

This bears watching. Of course, the devil is in the details: who is actually going to support what? Who is going to pay for this? How many homeowners could be helped?

More housing vouchers now being used in the suburbs

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A new report from the Brookings Institute suggests that more housing vouchers are now being used in the suburbs. Here is a quick summary of their findings:

This study analyzes the changing location of HCV recipients within the nation’s largest metro areas in the 2000s and finds:

  • Nearly half of all HCV recipients lived in suburban areas in 2008. However, HCV recipients remained less suburbanized than the total population, the poor population, and affordable housing units generally.
  • Black HCV recipients suburbanized fastest over the 2000 to 2008 period, though white HCV recipients were still more suburbanized than their black or Latino counterparts by 2008.  Black HCV recipients’ suburbanization rate increased by nearly 5 percent over this period, while that for Latinos increased by about 1 percent.  The suburbanization rate for white HCV recipients declined slightly.
  • Within metro areas, HCV recipients moved further toward higher-income, jobs-rich suburbs between 2000 and 2008.  However, the poor and affordable housing units shifted more rapidly toward similar kinds of suburbs over that period.  By 2008 about half of suburban HCV recipients still lived in low-income suburbs.
  • Between 2000 and 2008, metro areas in the West and those experiencing large increases in suburban poverty exhibited the biggest shifts in HCV recipients to the suburbs.  Western metro areas like Stockton, Boise, and Phoenix experienced increases of 10 percentage points or more in the suburbanization rate of HCV recipients.

This shouldn’t really be a surprise as more poor people now live in suburbs than big cities. But this could help explain how some of the poor are moving to the suburbs. As the US government has moved away from funding high-rise housing projects to providing housing vouchers, more people have decided to use these in the suburbs where there may be more housing and jobs.

These findings could also bring up some interesting issues regarding how suburban communities and residents feel about the use of housing vouchers in nearby housing. I think it is safe to assume that many suburban residents would not necessarily want to live near poorer residents but the voucher program makes this a bit more anonymous. If people knew that their community was a popular site for the use of housing vouchers, what would they do?

I would also suspect that the use of these vouchers in clustered in less wealthy suburbs, not very spread out throughout the metropolitan region.

Asking “why aren’t Americans moving to the city”

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Even as the percentage of Americans who live in the suburbs has increased over the decades, one writer asks “why aren’t Americans moving to the city?”

Polling by the real estate advising firm RCLCO finds that 88 percent of Millenials want to live in cities. Their parents, the Baby Boomers, also express a burning desire to live in denser, less car-dependent settings. But in the past decade, many major cities saw population declines, and the overwhelming majority of population growth was in the suburbs…

Methinks we may have jumped the gun on the whole collapse of the suburbs bit…

For the Millenials, the showstopper was jobs, or lack thereof. They managed to survive the last few years of college, but lacking paying work in the city, they’ve moved back in with mom and dad. So now they’re all kicking it in the TV room back on Deerhaven Drive, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia reruns and dreaming of big city living.

There are other factors that have slowed down the great urban migration that predate our recent economic woes: Crime rates are down nationwide, but that has done little to diminish the perception that cities are dark, violent places. Poverty, addiction, and blight still haunt many urban centers. Then there are the kids. The Millenials aren’t the first generation of young people to get all stoked about the city. The ones before them continue to pick up and leave as soon as Junior hits school age.

Of course, much of this is the result of ill-advised investment: We’ve poured money into unsustainable suburban development while starving the urban centers. (One writer on this website recently argued convincingly that subsidized sprawl is a giant Ponzi scheme.)

But I think there is a deeper force at work here. Here’s another headline that reads like it could have come out of the Onion: “Almost half of Americans want to live somewhere else.”

It’s actually from USA Today, and the accompanying story looks at a 2009 PEW Research Center poll that found that 46 percent of the public “would rather live in a different type of community from the one they’re living in now — a sentiment that is most prevalent among city dwellers.”…

Listen, I don’t mean to belabor this point. This is all just to say that the urban renaissance is not fait accompli.

This seems like a reasonable argument to me: there is no guarantee, as some critics have suggested, that Americans will see the error of the suburbs and flock back to the city. For many Americans, the suburbs seem to offer the best alternative to other living options: it combines some of more rural living (a bit of land) and more urban living (amenities nearby). Attacks on the suburbs won’t necessarily change their minds though higher costs of living (gas prices, less valuable houses) might.

The cited survey is also interesting. The Pew website about the survey is titled “For Nearly Half of America, Grass Is Greener Somewhere Else.” Are Americans simply afflicted with an itch to be somewhere else? Is this manifest destiny in action? Also in this survey:

Americans are all over the map in their views about their ideal community type: 30% say they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area.

If you combined the small town and suburban percentages, you would get almost the exact percentage of Americans who live in the suburbs. So when people responded that they would prefer a small town, do they really mean a suburban small town or a more rural small town and living in a rural area is more of living on a farm or five acre plot of land far from a big city?