Two words: Ronald Reagan.
Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else?
Submitted 13 hours ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
mechoman444@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
masterspace@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
Is there a point you can find in history where we paid doctors, teachers, and nurses close to what they’re worth and more than professional athletes?
It sounds like you’re nostalgic for a time that never existed.
jif@piefed.ca 12 hours ago
There was definitely a time when professional athlete was hardly a career, and certainly not well paid. So for a time teachers and healthcare workers got paid more than athletes.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
You really have to split it up. Teachers and nurses have always been paid pretty poorly. They were traditionally female only professions, and expected only to work until married or what not. Or they were nuns, and didn’t get paid directly. Doctors of course, being traditionally male only got paid a lot better. But I agree that for most of human history, professional athletes were just rich peoples kids. They weren’t even getting paid most likely. It would be interesting to try and figure out who the first true professional athlete was. Someone who wasn’t born into money, and actually got paid a living wage.
Mongostein@lemmy.ca 10 hours ago
In the CFL (Canadian Football League) the players don’t make more than $100,000/yr generally, and the good ones get scooped up to the NFL.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I mean if you back to the Greeks and Roman’s, they also had some big payouts for sporting events.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 10 hours ago
OP is also only comparing top earners. For every athlete who earns millions, there’s probably hundreds of athletes who make around median income or less - it’s the kind of career where people will keep doing it even if it pays barely enough to pay the bills. There are a lot of doctors who make more than the poorer professional athletes, and doctors don’t age out.
bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
Is pretty meaningless to look at top earners.
Some specialist doctors are making a million dollars a year, but the average is closer to $375,000.
Much like musicians, there are huge numbers of “professional” athletes that are not making a living wage. The low end for medical doctors is plenty to survive.
I think it’s distasteful when people complain about people earning six figures not getting as much as others, while we have people dying in the streets from capitalistic poverty.
TheAsianDonKnots@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
1980’s Reaganomics, early recession, rising inequality, “greed is good” culture, heightened Cold War tensions, the emergence of the AIDS crisis, and societal shifts towards consumerism. The 80’s was also a time of technological boom with computers, MTV, and cultural dynamism, with critiques often focusing on increased individualism, materialism, and social challenges.
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 12 hours ago
A lot of jackass answers in here but this is the answer to the spirit of the question.
Reaganomics or it’s other name “trickle down” economics is what you want to start looking into.
AtariDump@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] 3 hours ago
Adam Ruins Every….no wait. Reagan Ruined Evening.
GraniteM@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I think the seeds may have been planted with the radio. Once athletes became celebrities it was only a matter of time. I know little about baseball, but even I know who Babe Ruth was, who played into the 1930s. TV blowing up in the 40s added an additional layer of connecting the names to the faces. This eventually gave way for MTV to come into the mix creating the beginnings of modern pop culture.
TheAsianDonKnots@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
I’m not sure why OP or other comments are so hung up on the Athlete part? One of the most famous and wealthiest athletes of all time was a Roman charioteer. Gaius Appuleius Diocles was a celebrity across empires and predated doctors, Jesus and the radio. The only people that got paid more than Gaius were landowners/lords, which is still true to this day.
Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Around here most of the superintendents and principles at the schools are ex coaches. They spend education money on sports. They build huge facilities that only a fraction of the students get to access. All the while teachers spend their own money to ensure their kids have the bare minimum of supplies to learn. Its abhorrent.
Underwaterbob@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Remember your princiPLEs, he’s your princiPAL.
Itdidnttrickledown@lemmy.world 2 minutes ago
I remember spellcheck gets it wrong and I don’t really worry about it.
watson387@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
Look up Ronald Reagan’s administration.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 11 hours ago
lol
Was gonna say “IDK, but I am willing to be it was during Reagan’s presidency” and this is the first comment I see.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
It pre-dated Reagan. I’d say it started in the early 1960s, right about the time Boomers started becoming adults.
AA5B@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Ridiculous pay for star athletes and celebrities is at least fair: they’re directly bringing in tons of money/profit, so why shouldn’t they be rewarded?
However they’re more a symptom than the actual problem. The real problem is the manipulative nature of sky high ticket prices, merchandising, ads, etc. how can these firms of entertainment command prices people can no longer afford, exploiting captive audiences, etc, to generate so much profit? The stars should get rewarded with a share of the profits they generate, but it’s ridiculous how much those activities generate.
In a sane world, I could afford to take my family to a game/concert/theme park, we can decide to bring in our own water, food and t-shirts only cost a little more than in the outside world, there are no ad timeouts, no region locking, no public funding, and the owners should be taxed at a higher rate than I am. But at every step, we’ve adopted anti-consumer policy, increased inequality, and it just adds up - society rewards exploitation, removes consumer protections and fairness. We’re no longer people, just products
booly@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
Ridiculous pay for star athletes and celebrities is at least fair
Put another way, we as a society actually do spend wayyy more money on doctors, nurses, and teachers. It’s just that there are many millions of people who have to split that pot of money, whereas for pro athletes there are only a few dozen or a few hundred to split that comparably smaller pot of money with.
I might have the same favorite NBA player as literally millions of people in this country. I for sure don’t have the same favorite doctor or favorite teacher, though.
So if a genie showed up and said “give $1 to your favorite celebrity and give $100 to your favorite teacher,” we as a society would give way more money to the teachers, but each individual teacher would receive less than each individual celebrity who gets paid under this system.
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
So they should the dramatically taxed and that money redistributed.
P00ptart@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Why athletes? People attack athletes all the time and ignore that the team owners make $ with a B instead of an M. CEOs do far less for their organization than athletes and make far more money.
SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Many athletes also wreck their bodies and play with potential disability or death, while not gaining knowledge and experience for any other career, aside from coaching. And they have to retire at thirty-something at best. So having athletes presumes some kinda compensation for the rest of their lives and support for their family.
It’s enough to see Muhammad Ali try to speak in interviews late in his career after he’s been banged on the head too many times, to grok the tradeoff.
zbyte64@awful.systems 10 hours ago
Was thinking about this in the context of a joke I heard in the late 90s:
What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.
We didn’t we have jokes like that about the billionaires; at the time people were glazing Bill Gates. It’s wild because billionaires are the ones writing the laws, lawyers just act it out.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
How about both?
Ziggurat@jlai.lu 5 hours ago
Obligatory reminder that highest paid athlete in(western) history is Gaius Appuleius Diocles a Byzantine era Chariotter.
JackDark@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I don’t think doctors fit in that group. They are paid well, and respected, far more than nurses on both accounts.
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 47 minutes ago
Doctors are paid like crap. Physicians are paid very well.
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yea, but that doesn’t fit OP’s childlike view of the world so shut up, nerd!
piyuv@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
What “childlike view”? Do you remember which jobs were considered “essential” during COVID-19 or were you too young?
otp@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
Where I live, we’ve been treating…
- Nurses very poorly. Underpaying and overworking them, while not training enough new ones.
- Family Doctors (aka. GPs) very poorly by removing the kinds of services they’re allowed to provide, increasing expenses without increasing compensation, and again, not training enough new ones.
Doctors are paid well, but they also have incredibly high expenses (and often high student debt, too).
ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Going back in history, a doctor/surgeon/dentist and barber were the same. At some point a doctor became elevated to something more than meat technician. Probably the English during the Enlightenment with their different scientific clubs that helped distinguish doctors.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 13 hours ago
Complaining about athletes just makes it sound petty. Athletes are just employees, if you’re going to complain, complain about the athletes’ and nurses’ employers. Rich people never gave a flying fuck about their employees, and underfunded schools are a feature for them, too.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 12 hours ago
And the overwhelming majority of athletes do not earn well. It’s only the top 1% that gets rich, and only those in sports with a lot of public appeal.
Cruxifux@feddit.nl 12 hours ago
I always hate when this argument is used when were talking about celebrities here. As if a famous athlete or a famous musicians relation to labour and the benefits of that labour is at all comparable to say a coal miner’s relationship with capital.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Professions that have a high pay cealing do have a different relationship to capital than miners, nurses etc., but most athletes and musicians still aren’t millionaires. It just feels like a waste of effort to complain about a celebrity who owns tens of millions, when the core issue is the people who own hundreds and thousands of millions. Crab bucket mentality IMO.
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Baseball players went on strike in 1972. They’d had a ‘union’ since the 1800s, but always bowed to the owners.
forrgott@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Complaining about athletes just makes it sound petty.
And your opening statement makes your entire post sound completely out of touch.
jasoman@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I say it was around 1998 when George W. Bush meet with Harambe’s mom.
Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 hours ago
Assuming your talking about the top line players making millions, because your median professional athlete is barely covering there costs if you include athletes outside of the big 5 sports in the US and those outside of the top flight leagues. Then like any performer embedded in the monoculture it happened when mass media became a thing.
Once your able to sell discs, tapes, TV ads on a mass scale with extremely low marginal cost anyone with a claim to that media property can make millions off of it.
TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website 12 hours ago
False dichotomy. First not all athletes are paid « astronomically ». That’s only a particular subset and in very particular exposures. The reason they makes millions is because they makes billions for the team’s owner. Now this owners use their billions to ensure that the world continues that way.
Second athletes have normally a really really short career vs. Doctor. They mortgage their bodies (and their mental sanity) in a 10 years period and are unable to work very well after that if your salary don’t represent that their no point in doing it and the owner will not make money.
All in all. Athletes are workers (with some benefit) like us and should be seen as such. The real grinch are the owners
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 10 hours ago
A lot of people from the US seem to be ignoring the rest of the world exists and screaming Reagan (the US president from 1981-1989). I honestly don’t know how accurate that is but its obviously not nuanced and biased by anti-Trump sentiment
I’m not sure how accurate this article is either but it mentions the salary cap for soccer in England being removed in 1960 and that leading to a rapid increase in wages there.
salaryleaks.com/…/average-salary-premier-league-h…
A quick scan of the internet led me to this chart that compares top soccer players to median income in (for some reason) the US
From: www.expensivity.com/soccer-salary-inflation/
Here’s another chart from the same article for how many times a US families income a top international player makes (and like the England article the 60s look to be exponential growth, then noise in the 70s then pretty clear from the 80s):
Timeline of top internal player money proportional to the median US income for a family
A lot of that analysis has space for biases but I’m pretty sure that modern large sports wages predate Reagan
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I have to admit that, without wanting to defend absurd wages for anyone, there’s a pretty decent explanation in the case of athletes. If you’re one of the top ten boxers in the world, there are tens (hundreds?) of millions of people that want to see your matches. It’s not unreasonable to ask for some compensation for providing entertainment, so let’s say each viewer is paying 1 USD / match. After paying the costs of setting up the match, you’re still left with millions of dollars per match.
Specially in the case of top-level athletes, we’re in a situation where very may people want to see very few people provide entertainment. Even if they take a very low price, they’re still going to be making buckets of money. I don’t really think that would be unfair, provided they actually charged some small amount. What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 8 hours ago
What irritates me is that the sports associations have decided to charge absurd amounts to squeeze people fore mine to make even more. That should definitely be illegal.
I split out my reply to this part because it’s obvious it will be downvoted heavily in Lemmy
I get the sentiment but how does that effectively work?
Running the economics framing: Prices act to lower consumers willing to pay so if there is a limited resource, like a ticket, then its a way to filter out until you have how much it’s worth.
That’s mostly influenced by how keen fans are, how many fans there are, and how rich they are.
You can use a lottery alone or in conjunction but that usually leads to a black market with expensive tickets too. It seems pretty reasonable to me to have a lottery for some of the tickets to be in a lottery, but it also seems to not work that well practically.
It seems like for a lot of things time is used as a commodity for at least some tickets, like waiting in line overnight or first to load the page. Both don’t really stop rich people, and have their other issues like realistically rewarding luck for if you hit refresh at the right moment without the server dying.
And it seems like some tickets go out to fan groups or individuals that have proven the care about the event like some trivia questions.
Looking at that, I’m just not intelligent enough to know how you really avoid at least a decent number of the tickets being expensive for some of the popular events.
I think this has gotten worse over time and I wonder how much of that is because we can move so much more freely than before. Or if there is another mechanism. Or if I’m just flat wrong here
Either way, I’m not sure how you make that substantially better
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 8 hours ago
Yeah, some of the mechanisms the push the wage higher are pretty reasonable in isolation. I personally would love to see higher taxes on people earning these huge amounts (so CEOs etc) but I think it’s really unlikely to happen or be effective until we have stronger global treaties and I also don’t understand how you really do it with incomes that can be exponential (giving the benefit of the doubt: users / fans) since that somewhat neutralises that starts hitting brackets with a lot of nines.
Yawweee877h444@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
This is just capitalism, isn’t it?
Athletes and entertainers that make millions do so because people pay for it in large numbers. This is what capitalism wants and does.
I agree with your sentiment but I think you’re just critiquing capitalism. If I had my way these people would be taxed up the wazoo. No baseball player or Hollywood actor should ever be worth 10s of millions, let alone hundreds, or billions.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 10 hours ago
I think some of this is related to radio, tv and internet too. Before radio few people could follow a game live so the audience, or at least live emotional audience, is a lot smaller and that’s pretty aligned to profit. Or put another way, if every Messi or Taylor Swift fan gave 50c every year they’d be filthy rich but that was harder to ached before radio with things being more localised.
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 10 hours ago
A friend shared this a month or so ago and I haven’t been able to check how accurate it is but apparently its soccer player wages in 1999:
Highest soccer earners in 1999
That was a lot of money at the time, but even adjusting for inflation it really doesn’t seem to be the fuckoff money they get now
gaiussabinus@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Bread and Circuses, nothing else for the filthy plebs.
otp@sh.itjust.works 12 hours ago
I understand the skepticism on society’s priorities.
Athletes are literally 1-in-a-million individuals. They bring in crazy amounts of money from people who want to watch them play.
The real problem is that there are so many people who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to watch a sports game, but not willing to see teachers properly compensates (in my opinion). Because athletes getting a big share of the pie that they’re bringing in sounds fair to me. The question is why people have that much pie to give them, and not as much pie to give to schools.
Supervisor194@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I think the real problem is a government structure that lends itself to being captured by monied interests. The problem of capitalism chasing the money is only a problem because we have a government unable to properly tax the wealthy to ensure no one can amass the kind of wealth that makes it possible to capture the government.
zbyte64@awful.systems 9 hours ago
This. Everyone wants qualified, well paid teachers for their kids, just like how most people want universal healthcare. But our government and media structure actively disempowers any such movements in that direction.
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I believe the standard singularity was in 1971. At least, according to wtfhappenedin1971.com
kindred@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
Something wrong with that link
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Yeah, Idk I beans’d it somehow.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 hours ago
Might want this one: What the Fuck Happened In 1971?
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 8 hours ago
Outside of the USA? You can still start around the 70’s as a time when medical costs started increasing as the greatest generation started to retire, taking away talent from the workforce and starting to use all those retirement benefits they were entitled to. You also had an increase in quality of medicine, which usually came at a cost.
Funding these higher costs would require new taxes, which was becoming politically unpopular across First World democracies.
BassTurd@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Athletes that have spent thousands of hours training their whole lives to be the some of best in the world at their craft, generate billions of dollars doing their job. Why shouldn’t they get paid well from that pool of billions?
Teachers, nurses, etc should get paid more, but their professions don’t generate the same kind of revenue as the entertainment industry, so that money has to come from some other source, like the government.
zbyte64@awful.systems 10 hours ago
Revenue is not the same as value, teachers enable much more economic activity than athletes. The fact we equate “profit generated” to the value of the profession is part of the problem.
BassTurd@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I agree, but the money has to come from somewhere. Athletes generate the money they are paid, and they generate a lot so they get paid accordingly.
I don’t think that we are equating profit generated as value. It’s just a fact that athletes make lots of money because they generate it.
I think that what should happen is that the organizations/teams that are making billions should be taxed higher or something equivalent and those funds should go to under paid professionals like teachers. But, I don’t think that athletes should make less because there’s enough extra profits that both can exist.
AA5B@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
profit generated by teachers is too indirect, too long term. Most people can’t even seem to conceptualize it, much less quantify it, plus who’s going to stay at a job 20+ years before they get a payoff
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 11 hours ago
You mean the social sector being chronically underpaid with no improvement in sight? I blame less and less regulated lobbyism, a.k.a. legal corruption. Because the social sector doesn’t have one, usually. It would often amount to the government bribing itself. What, politicians making good decisions without looking out for a payday, you say?
zbyte64@awful.systems 9 hours ago
And when the social sector lobbies it is called “special interests” by the press. When capital owners do it they are called “job creators” by the press.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Are you talking from the pov of one specific country?
fodor@lemmy.zip 5 hours ago
The first point, more than anything else, is to use the word “we” when you actually mean it. If you can’t do that, you can’t handle a complicated societal situation.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Ok… I’ll bite.
What it are you referring to?
And are you using a translator?
SolidShake@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Always leaving the mechanics out lol. My career is always under looked but yet everyone comes crawling in when their car doesn’t work haha
Thoath@leminal.space 9 hours ago
puts the movie, ‘Gifted Hands’ infront of you
BodePlotHole@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Steve@communick.news 13 hours ago
November 6th 1988
Nothing special about they day really. It’s just happened to be the day when the Legrand Poumpaugh themselves decreed as such. Praise their nostrals.
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Unions have been squashed for decades, they used to be 40% or so, now down to 10%.
People will blame Reagan, but let’s be real they are trying to erase unions every day (and succeeding in USA).
BoTh PaRtIes are anti-union and pro-owner. Because they have the most money to “donate”, there’s no big conspiracy, just math. People who have no money don’t contribute to political campaigns, yet free speech is money, or something.