I love sports and I love playing sports.
I like games, playing games.
And whenever, you know, you year about or think about cheating I think most of us say
oh, you know, the knee jerk response is that’s terrible.
Like people shouldn’t cheat, right.
They shouldn’t break the rules.
But I got to thinking about it and sometimes when I read the sports section of a newspaper
particularly it seems like about three-quarters of the articles are about some version of
cheating, right.
Either contractually or performance enhancing or trying to gain some advantage outside the
rules.
And I got to thinking, you know, maybe we actually like it that way.
Cheating is just like the heightened version of wanting to win really, really badly.
So in a way you kind of admire the people who cheat to win.
Now cheating to lose is different.
And we punish no one more than the people who like throw games.
Cheating to lose we really don’t like.
But cheating to win I think we kind of get it.
We say that, you know, even if it’s like Alex Rodriguez who’s, you know, I live in
New York.
He went from being one of the – he’s still one of the most famous athletes in the last
50 years but went from being revered for his unbelievable talent to being one of the most
despised athletes because he just cheated over and over again and kept lying about it
and kept getting caught in a very kind of ham handed way.
But even so you kind of have to respect someone who wants so badly to win and to do better
that they’re willing to give themselves human growth hormones or whatever.
So in that way I kind of think that cheating is like something that we root for a little
bit.
We get it.
We identify with it.
Deflategate.
I mean it’s kind of idiotic in one way.
On the other hand look how totally obsessed we are with the fact that the New England
Patriots may have taken I don’t know a half pound or a pound square inch of air pressure
out of the footballs.
We love it.
And so like as a moralist you say cheating is bad.
We should decry all cheating.
Cheating in sports is terrible.
But as a person if you look at how much we love it and as an economist, you know, you
look at not what people say they love but what they actually do.
Like not what, you know, if you ask people how are you going to – I’ll give you $100.
How are you going to spend it?
Oh, I’m going to give $50 away and then I’ll use the other $30 to buy a present
for my friend.
Then maybe the other bit I’ll buy something for myself.
But then if you watch how the people – then if you give people $100 and see how they actually
spend it, they don’t give half away, right.
So we might say we hate cheating but I think in our hearts we kind of love it because it
gives us something else to talk about when the games are over.