South Africa's World Cup failure

Large domestic and international sporting events, along with a lot of one-off things like conventions, are usually economic drains, and it's a real shame when the country is poor to begin with. Such it is with South Africa:

The World Cup is set to be a major financial disappointment for the host nation South Africa, after it became clear that international fans have decided to stay away and their tickets are being sold cheaply to South Africans.

Less than three weeks before kick-off on 11 June, South Africa's revamped airports and spruced-up cities are staging an impressive show of readiness for the arrival of international fans – although now it seems there may be half a million fewer than expected.

Does this really surprise anyone? South African cities are notorious for their crime, and in Britain it has the reputation of not being a friendly place to whites (rightly or wrongly deserved), and they are generally the only soccer fans who can afford to travel. Apart from this metaphorical distance, it's also literally really far away from pretty much everywhere, especially rich northern/western hemisphere countries. Even southern hemisphere Australia and New Zealand are a very long way away.

Jogging in Moscow

The Moscow Times has a hilarious article about the trials and tribulations that joggers face in Moscow. It starts with an anecdote about a foreign correspondent in Moscow in 1981 who was trailed by the KGB because his jogging routine aroused suspicion, but here's the best part of the article (especially the last paragraph):

Greg Walters, a former Moscow Times reporter and now a guitarist in Brooklyn-based indie rock group Red Wire Black Wire, used to jog in Chistiye Prudy when he lived in Moscow.

“If I ran through after 2 p.m., I’d get heckled by groups of men drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. A couple times, some of them sarcastically jogged along with me, laughing uproariously. They thought I was hilarious,” Walters said in an e-mail.

The woman who answered the phone at the Russian Athletics Federation simply sneered. “We have nothing to do with people who just run around outside for exercise. We have athletes, professionals who run in competitions.”

Now that I think about it, I never saw people jogging when I lived in Bucharest.

...and I've said it before and I'll say it again: The Moscow Times is a great paper.

Atlantic Yards and ACORN

I've heard a lot of nasty things about the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, where NJ Nets owner Bill Ratner wants to use a combinatino of eminent domain and state giveaways to build a heavily subsidized basketball stadium and 16 mixed use high-rises, but I didn't realize that ACORN was also in on it:

New York, in short, would give Ratner an unfair advantage, and he would return some of the profits reaped from that advantage by creating the “economic benefits” favored by the planning classes. Architecture critics loved Frank Gehry’s design for the arena. Race activist Al Sharpton loved the promise of thousands of minority jobs. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) loved the prospect of administering the more than 2,000 units of “affordable” housing planned for the development, as well as the $1.5 million in loans and grants that Ratner gave it outright. When the state held public hearings in 2006 to decide whether to approve Atlantic Yards, hundreds of supplicants, hoping for a good job or a cheap apartment, easily drowned out the voices of people like Goldstein, who wanted nothing from the government except the right to keep their homes.

Why do we regulate most harms, but subsidize lethal sports?

Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias has just discovered that even a short football career takes years off your life (compared which, say, soccer, which adds years), and asks:

...why do we regulate other health harms so strictly, yet so eagerly watch this decimation?

It's an interesting psycho-/sociological question, but a much more relevant policy question is: why do we subsidize it? High school and college programs (which actually draw larger audiences than the pros) are essentially subsidized vocational schools for the NFL, and even the nominally private NFL teams are massively subsidized in the form of stadiums. In fact, opposition to stadium subsidies is one of the few policy issues that almost unanimously unites economists.

It's an interesting thought experiment: without the enormous from public schools and city governments, what would the sports industry look like? Would football still be the most popular sport?

A better way to decrease homophobia on campuses

The Weekly Standard has an article criticizing Yale's new expenditure on an "Office of LGBTQ Resources," in light of recent cut-backs in other areas. Though I disagree with some things in the article (what's so bad about "gender-neutral housing," which doesn't cost a cent?), I agree with the overall gist, which is that an LGBTQ office isn't going to do jack-shit for anyone.

Might I suggest another strategy colleges around the country could take to decrease incidences of homophobia on campus: stop giving sports scholarships and recruiting people for sports who otherwise wouldn't have gained admission. It might not be PC to say it, but in my experience, those are the worst offenders when it comes to homophobia.

Olympic frivolity

Sports stadiums, in addition to being costly propositions rarely built with private money, are urban planning killjoys. They're huge, usually in relatively well-used areas, necessitate large amounts of parking, and use a lot of land around the edges for landscaping. They choke off all street life in the immediate vicinity – though the place might be packed in the evenings for games, during the rest of the day, it just takes of the most valuable resource a city has: space. I thought about all of this when I saw the blueprints for London's 2012 Olympic stadiums. They're beautiful pieces of architecture, for sure, but they create these huge voids, and take up what could be very valuable real estate.

An orgy fit for an Olympian

Every four years, the Olympics happen. But more importantly, every four years there are stories in the press about the notorious orgy-like atmosphere in the Olympic Village. This Olympic season's story (or, at least, the best I've seen) goes to the Times of London. It's long, detailed, has tons of sexual puns and erotic imagery, and even sports a list of hot 2008 Olympians at the end, sorted by medal. But this one also includes an interesting sociological observation:

Before we get to that, however, it is worth noting an intriguing dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling. The chaps who win gold medals - even those as geeky as Michael Phelps - are the principal objects of desire for many female athletes. There is something about sporting success that makes a certain type of woman go crazy - smiling, flirting and sometimes even grabbing at the chaps who have done the business in the pool or on the track. An Olympic gold medal is not merely a route to fame and fortune; it is also a surefire ticket to writhe.

But - and this is the thing - success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous. I do not condone this phenomenon, merely note it.

Empty seats and hotels in Beijing

According to the Washington Post, there are plenty of empty seats at the events in Beijing, despite the mad rush to acquire them in the first place. Also, more startlingly, even the hotels are empty:

Others said the more strict visa restrictions in place this year could be keeping foreign ticket holders away. Across Beijing, hotels and tourist sites are reporting below-average attendance for August. Many of the foreigners in Tiananmen Square, under tight security for the Games, are not individual tourists but part of Olympic delegations.

"Business is worse than at this time last year," said a receptionist at a 22-room hotel in Beijing's Chongwen district, where rooms cost $28 a night. "It's the season for traveling and last year the hotel was full. The Olympics should have brought business to Beijing, but the reality is too far from the expectation."

What d'ya know – people don't like putting up with police states!

More on not-so-economically-stimulating Olympic games here, with the complete Olympics archive here.

Athenians have second thoughts about Olympics

According to a story in the Christian Science Monitor, some in the city of Athens are reconsidering whether hosting the 2004 Olympic Games was really worth the $15 billion cost. The stadiums lie either empty or underutilized. Athens got some infrastructure out of the deal – the metro was revamped, the ancient city center was beautified, and the airport was enlarged – but all of those investments could have been made without hosting the Olympics. Beijing is spending an estimated $40 billion on their coming out party, but authoritarian regimes are insulated from the oversight and criticism that other Olympic hosts face from their citizens. The article also implies that Tokyoites are a lot less receptive to the idea of hosting the Olympics in 2016 than they were in 1964. The trend seems to be that citizens in booming, upcoming cities (Tokyo 1964, Beijing 2008) are more likely to welcome the Olympics than citizens of dynamic market-oriented cities who don't need to prove themselves to the world.

All my writings on Olympics-related topics here, with more examples of Olympics-gone-wrong in Sochi and Baku.

Sochi fails to impress

In continuing with the dictatorships and their Olympics dreams theme, a story from the Moscow Times (via La Russophobe – a blog brimming with depressing news about Russia) talks about the Russians' troubles in Sochi. In the world of Olympics politics, Russia had to at least be given a Winter Olympics, and so the southern resort city of Sochi will host the 2014 Winter Olympics. Though Putin did better than Aliyev in Azerbaijan in that he actually got the Olympics, it appears there is trouble with the construction. The IOC commission was a bit concerned when accusations of mismanagement and cost overruns started showing up in the media. But now, apparently the head of the oh-so-Sovietly named state corporation "Olimpstroi" has resigned amidst the scandal:

When Vainshtok resigned last Thursday, government officials said the change in command had been planned in advance and would not affect the pace of preparations.

But a flurry of subsequent media reports suggested that Vainshtok had quit because he realized the task was too unwieldy.

"It is very difficult to make Sochi an Olympic city," an unidentified official said, RIA-Novosti reported. "There are many infrastructure limitations – no electricity, no roads, no way to get cargoes there needed for building."

Hint to future authoritarians considering hosting the Olympics: it's not worth the embarrassment.

Attacks on unarmed Tibetans caught on tape

Europeans climbing Mt. Everest seem to have caught some extremely disturbing footage of Tibetans being picked off by Chinese soldiers while trying to make a pilgrimage to see the Dalai Lama in India. According to the narrator, the national Chinese news agency was broadcasting news that Chinese soldiers had been attacked by Tibetan pilgrims while trying to nonviolently persuade the Tibetans to return. I can't vouch for the video's authenticity, but I do see that it was produced by ProTV, which is the most popular channel in Romania, so I doubt that it's fake. On the upside, at least someone was watching.

Update: This is apparently an old story from 2006.

Another reason to hate the Chinese government

From the Guardian: "Chinese ship carries arms cargo to Mugabe regime."

The story was confirmed by the South African government, who said they were powerless to intervene in the absence of a UN embargo. This shipment comes amidst the latest round of violence and crackdowns following the eternally-rigged elections. Earlier it seemed like Mugabe's time was up, but now it appears that he will fight to stay in control, and might succeed given with China's latest shipment of killing implements. According to the article, Sawatu, a South African transportation union, is refusing to deal with the cargo: "Satawu does not agree with the position of the government not to intervene with this shipment of weapons. Our members will not unload this cargo, neither will any of our members in the truck-driving sector move this cargo by road." As if the public needed another excuse to feel dirty about the 2008 Olympics.

More unrest in China: Uyghur edition

Yesterday I predicted that the Tibet protests would not be the last. Today, articles have been appearing across the internet about protests in Xinjiang province, which has a large Uyghur population. The Uyghurs are a Turkic people who adhere to Islam, and who live in the westernmost province of China. Like the Tibetans and most other non-Han minorities in China, the Uyghurs have long been resentful of Beijing's Han-centric style of control. In fact, a few years ago the Chinese capitalized on the post-9/11 terrorism fad, and accused the Uyghurs of Islamic terrorism, despite the fact that their concern is not fundamentalist theocracy, but rather increased autonomy from an oppressive government in Beijing. In a rare PR coup for the CCP, the Americans bought it, and even shipped a few of 'em off to Guantánamo, despite the Uyghurs' generally positive view of the United States.

Communist party PR: who can, who can't

China has reaffirmed its total ineptitude with handing PR on an international scale in claiming the Dalai Lama is orchestrating suicide attacks. It looks like China will be spared a Taiwanese declaration of independence during the Olympics, but I doubt the Tibet crisis will be the last one before the end of the games in late August. I think China has grossly overplayed its hand in hosting the Olympics – at least in America, China is the villain du jour because of the latest anti-globalization backlash provoked by the longer-than-ever presidential election season. Europe has a similar antagonism, divided between intellectuals who look down on their human rights abuses and lack of freedom, and those who have been riled up by protectionist sentiment. The CCP has become so sure of its propaganda techniques at home that thinks that they'll work against world audiences. The truth is that they probably don't even work in China – the threat of the state coming down is strong enough to coax people into either apolitical or pro-party stances. I don't see this at all helping China anywhere where it matters (i.e., advanced democracies). In the rest of the world, the power and money is in the hands of people who aren't particularly concerned with China's big coming out party.

China ought to take a page from Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's totalitarian dictator. The Soviets had taught him well, and he turned on the Soviet Union (at least publicly) and managed to be the only communist dictator to secure Most Favored Nation trade privileges from the US. He knew that identifying a common enemy was key to obtaining favors from the West (at least till he went too far and squandered it all in the late '80s), and that allowed him to do some pretty terrible things. Essentially, Ceaușescu courted the West by railing against the Soviets, all in order to cover up behavior that was for more anti-liberal than anything in the USSR after Stalin.

Putin used the same model, and anti-terrorism was what he used to get Bush to look into his eyes and "get a sense of his soul" – and it was a good sense. Meanwhile, it's likely that Russia fabricated a lot of the attacks that were supposedly perpetrated by "Chechen terrorists." The apartment bombings that were the direct cause of the Second Chechen war were most likely black flag operations by the KGB FSB. Moscow theater crisis, too.

Of course, dictatorships have no monopoly on disingenuous PR. America has clearly provoked, if not intentionally, a lot of Islamic terrorism against itself, all in the name of rooting it out. Thankfully for Americans, it doesn't do nearly as well with PR than the dictatorships.

Sydney, Athens, Beijing, London, Baku?

I wonder what the cumulative cost of long-shot Olympic bids like this one in Baku, Azerbaijan are?