Auburn University’s football team lost every game in 1950. As Bill Cromartie put it in his book Braggin’ Rights, a game-by-game account of the Alabama-Auburn football rivalry, “Alabama fans laughed, poked fun at and cracked jokes about Auburn.” The Auburn Tigers got their revenge in 1955 when they beat the Alabama Crimson Tide 26-0 to hand the Alabama Crimson Tide a winless season of their own. The Auburn faithful were ecstatic, and they reveled in their rivals’ misery.
In a conflict-riddled world, your gain is their loss, and vice versa. In a world infected with the zero-sum fallacy, there can be only one conclusion: whatever they have, they must have stolen.
It has always puzzled me with respect to college football. The NFL is a zero-sum game across the board: if you’re the Cincinnati Bengals competing for the AFC Central championship, then of course you want the Browns, Ravens, and Steelers to lose every week because their losses are your gains. It’s a little more complicated in college football, however, because the reward structure relies so heavily on impressions. The College Football Playoff is an invitational affair, and strength of schedule matters. No one was seriously advocating that the Liberty Flames get a spot in the 2023 year’s four-team CFP, even though they won all their games because they played a weaker schedule against which most teams in the Power Five conferences probably would have gone unbeaten.
If you ask a lot of college football fans, every Saturday brings the possibility of two great outcomes:
Our team wins.
Our hated rival loses.
A bit of good-natured ribbing for your neighbor flying the rivals’ flag can be fun and all, but this doesn’t make a lot of sense if you want to win championships. A more rational scheme would be:
Our team wins.
Any outcome that makes our team look better.
That means rooting for the rivals. Alabama got into the 2023 College Football Playoff on the strength of a decisive win over Georgia that wasn’t as close as the score indicated. If Georgia hadn’t won 29 straight games and back-to-back national championships, Alabama probably would have been passed over. Indeed, one of the main arguments against including Alabama was that they needed a last-second miracle play to beat an Auburn team that had been absolutely massacred on their home field by New Mexico State — a fine team, but a team Auburn had paid $1.8 million to serve as a punching bag.
So what does this have to do with political economy, and especially the upcoming presidential election? More than you might think. So much political discourse is about ensuring the bad guys suffer, even when their suffering hurts those who hate them. The people buying “Billionaire Tears” coffee cups and tumblers from Elizabeth Warren’s website in 2020 didn’t seem to realize that this is not a zero-sum game.
Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Bill Gates, and so many others became mega-wealthy not by stealing from people but by providing them with goods and services they liked at prices they were willing to pay. It’s ghoulish to think they should suffer.
College football fandom is a microcosm of the problem of a political economy. It shows that people are willing to pay a price to make their enemies suffer. This is all well and good in something innocuous like college sports — better that this all happens on the vicarious battlefields of college football rather than actual battlefields — but it is positively destructive in a world where we revel in others’ misery.
No one is poor because Jeff Bezos is rich. Unlike crowned heads and royal families, Jeff Bezos created his fortune by creating what is simply the greatest store that has ever existed: Amazon. Consuming his wealth — which includes a lot of Amazon stock — might briefly fund redistributive programs, but it reduces society’s stock of valuable productive assets, and thereby reduces everyone’s standard of living in the long run. In his article “Taxation as Social Justice,” Michael Munger refers to a song by Ten Years After that includes the lyric “Tax the rich/feed the poor/’til there are no rich no more.” He notes that it’s remarkable that it isn’t “‘til there are no poor no more.” Consuming Jeff Bezos’s capital out of spite and hamstringing Amazon might not be such a big deal if you’re reasonably healthy and financially comfortable and can maybe skip this latest iPhone. It’s a much bigger deal if you’re counting coins in the grocery store checkout line to see if you can afford to buy that last can of soup. The “billionaire tears” mug is funny and all, but there’s a lot of collateral damage. Being willing to lose a championship to hurt your sports rivals is one thing. Accepting lower living standards for everyone to hurt your political rivals is something else entirely.