Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in Athletes

[Update, September 2014: I wrote the below post in February 2012, when a prominent economist and blogger seriously claimed “The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits.” In a mere two-and-a-half years, the tide has turned considerably, and it had nothing to do with liability suits. Jason Kottke recently collected multiple articles by die-hard football fans explaining why they won’t watch the sport any more. More and more people can’t handle the greed, the violence, and the damage — just today, Esquire had a piece on the league’s disgraceful handling of Ray Rice’s domestic abuse. Professional football is dying, and it has nothing to do with lawsuits.]

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, has made a name for himself explaining how important it is that things stay just the way they are. (Cf. David Hume) Earlier this week, for example, he was in the New York Times opining that our banking oligarchy can’t be broken up because smaller banks “could make mistakes or take on bad risks without being punished very much in terms of capitalization revenue,” as if we didn’t just loan $1.2 trillion and directly pay $182 billion to bail out these same big banks precisely because they “made mistakes or took on bad risks.” As Paul Krugman aptly summed up one of Tyler’s critiques of a model of macroeconomics,

There’s something about macro that seems to invite this sort of thing: more even than the rest of economics, macro seems afflicted with people who mistake confusion for insight, who think their own failure to understand basic ideas reflects a failure of those ideas rather than their own limitations.

“Mistaking confusion for insight” is one of the hallmarks of attacks on our legal system, with nary a day going by without a prominent politician or the like making a hopelessly ignorant comment about the law, like Rick Santorum’s passionate argument in favor of scrapping the Constitution and replacing it with the Articles of Confederation.

Grantland, launched last year, was premised on the crazy idea that there existed a sizable market of readers who appreciated both long-form journalism and the world of sports. I haven’t a clue if the website is doing well financially, but they’ve been a journalistic success, with fascinating articles like this article on a boxing match in 1810 that set the stage for almost every fighting trope you see today. Just when I think the site is the go-to resource for sports reporting, I see Tyler Cowen (along with Kevin Grier, another economist) bring his ipse dixit style to the subject of tort lawyers and football:

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits. Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a “contagion effect” with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit. We have seen such domino effects with the risks of smoking or driving without seatbelts, two unsafe practices that were common in the 1960s but are much rarer today. The end result is that the NFL’s feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.

In other words, the old trial lawyers are taking the fun out of everything argument. It’s often trotted out to claim that lawyers are responsible for taking the fun out of playgrounds, so it was only inevitable before someone claimed that trial lawyers posed the greatest threat to our nation: as Cowen and Grier claim, because of lawyers, “American people … might actually start calling ‘soccer’ by the moniker of ‘football.’”

The horror!Continue Reading Brain Injuries, Not Lawyers, May Spell The End Of Football