FiveThirtyEightSports has a great piece about how much college quarterbacks are really worth in terms of market value. I’m neutral-but-leaning-against on the issue of paying college athletes, but the piece begins with University of Iowa Athletic Director Gary Barta giving a very bad reason to oppose it: it’s too complicated to figure out how much they should be paid. He’s right given how he’s conceiving the issue, he’s just not conceiving the issue in the right way.
Wages are not determined by a person or group of people independently evaluating what a job is “really” worth. That’s what markets do, i.e. that’s what innumerable decisions over time by innumerable anonymous consumers operating within the price system do. The failure to understand how the price system works in allocating resources by preferences is not unique to Barta. Very few people understand it, and lamentably even people who do understand it often…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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