Will the World Economy Ever Resemble the World Cup?
(Published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 22, 2014.)
Like many World Cup aficionados, I will allocate far too much of my time to watching soccer games on ESPN over the next few weeks. Why? Why do I like the World Cup so much?
I think it’s because I wish the world economy were more like the World Cup.
I love the Olympics, but the Olympics are too much like the real world of global economics.
In the Olympics there are too many events like gymnastics, equestrian competitions, and rowing, not to mention virtually all the winter sports, which require expensive, top-flight facilities. As a result, the rich countries bring home most of the gold, and most of the poor countries barely tune in. Many rural people in Latin America, for example, barely take interest in the Olympics. They could care less about beautifully groomed horses jumping fake fences, races in swimming pools, or about people screaming down snow and ice on high-tech equipment (except maybe to watch the wipeouts). But they love the World Cup.
And they love the World Cup not just because they love soccer. They love the World Cup because it offers at least one arena in which even the smallest, poorest countries can play on a level field with the Big Boys.
The game between the United States and Ghana last Monday captured this perfectly. Here is a nation of 320 million people, with an unrivaled military arsenal and a gross domestic product of $16 trillion, in heated battle against a small sub-Saharan African country with a puny, ill-equipped military and a GDP of only $40 billion (0.0025 of that of the United States). Yet this was the team that had eliminated the United States from the previous two World Cup tournaments. And the mighty United States had a score to settle — against Ghana.
I like the position of the United States in the World Cup. Team USA is ranked 13th in the world, proximate to some other decent teams, a little below England and Colombia, a little above France and Mexico. We are a good team, but not a great team, at least not yet. Unlike in the military and economic arenas, Americans take nothing for granted in the soccer world.
We rejoice in every goal; every World Cup win is admired like a precious gem. Most games are close; blowouts in either direction are rare for Team USA. In the Olympics, we are unsatisfied if we don’t whip every other country in the medal count. In the World Cup, we frankly are happy to be there, extra grateful if we make it to the second round.
Like few other games in the world of sport, soccer is a great equalizer. It is the most popular sport in all but a handful of countries, partly because its prerequisites are so few: a relatively flat surface and something that can be used as a ball. In the poorest areas in developing countries, an old T-shirt filled with leaves will do. Really desperate group of kids will simply use a rock. Barriers to entry are small.
How difficult it must be in poor countries to conceive of a world in which the barriers to global economic participation were as small as they are in soccer. This would be a world where a kid growing up in the favelas of Rio, or the slums of Nairobi, or the mountains of western Guatemala, would be able to enter the world of economic exchange on a level playing field with the daughters of an economics professor from San Francisco.
This would be a level playing field on which kids received sufficient nutrition when they were toddlers so that their minds were able to absorb concepts taught to them in the first grade.
It would be a level playing field where little girls could grow up free from jihadist groups that threaten their right to education, and where children could become teenagers free from the bitterness of displacement from civil war.
This would be a level playing field where teachers in the public schools of the developing world showed up to teach their classes, and where kids would graduate from high school with secondary school-level and not elementary-level math skills.
It would be a level playing field where free global trade meant the end of the protectionist agricultural subsidies, quotas, and tariffs that line the pockets of corporate farmers in Europe and the United States as they simultaneously impoverish peasant farmers in Africa.
For one month every four years, we can rejoice about something resembling a level playing field between the rich and the poor countries. It should cause us to work harder for a more level playing field during the other 47 months.
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