Prof. David Berri

David Berri (Ph.D., Colorado State University) is professor of economics at Southern Utah University. He is the co-author of The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Stumbling on Wins: Two Economists Explore the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports (Financial Times Press, 2010). In addition, he is the sole author of Sports Economics (a textbook forthcoming in 2018 from Macmillan). Prof. Berri has published more than fifty academic papers on such topics as the evaluation of players and coaches, competitive balance, the drafting of players, labor disputes, the NCAA, and gender issues in sports. He has also written on sports economics for a number of popular media outlets, including the New York Times, theAtlantic.com, and Time.com.

As an economist, how do you think the NBA or other sports will change in the near or distant future in ways people might not expect? 

Sports tend to be a realm dominated by men.  But more than 3 million girls play high school sports in the United States while more than 200,000 women play sports in college.  In addition, a recent Gallup poll indicated that 51% of women consider themselves sports fans.  So there are more than 60 million women who follow sports.

So the big change I think we will see in all sports is the increasing participation of women.  Men tend to think sports is their world.  But women very much like sports.  And in the future, the economics of sports is going to reflect this fact.  We will see more and more women playing sports and more and more women talking about sports.

Many men are not expecting this change.  But as the 21^st century proceeds, this is the change we are going to see in sports.
 
You have written a lot on the economic aspects of sports. Is the "sports + economics" niche full, or is there room for more people to work in this area? 

Sports economics -- like many "niche" fields in economics -- is far from saturated.  One issue is that many economists outside the field may not take work in this area as serious as they should.  But I sense this is true of many niche fields. 

Sports, though, provides an incredible data set to study human behavior.  So there are so many important issues one can examine in sports economics.  And these are often hard to study outside of sports.  Such topics as gender, race, managerial decision-making, and worker exploitation are but a sample of the issues that one can investigate in sports economics.

What's the best advice you ever got as you were thinking about becoming an economist?

More than a century ago, Alfred Marshall emphasized that economics “is not a body of concrete truth, but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth."  I think this one sentence should be remembered by anyone who wants to study economics.  Many treat economics as less of a science and more like a religion.  They cling to the idea that human beings are perfectly rational, markets are always good, and government doesn’t help.

You should approach economics with an understanding that the answer is often “it depends”.  Sometimes markets are a good idea.  Sometimes they are not. Sometimes government doesn’t help. Sometimes it definitely does.  One answer to all questions doesn’t exist. 

So you need to approach economics with an open-mind.  We don’t know the answer to our research questions until we do the research.  Often we are surprised by what we find.