Posted by spasticity on 6/21/2013 5:16:00 PM (view original):
Posted by llamanunts on 6/21/2013 5:01:00 PM (view original):
Posted by spasticity on 6/21/2013 4:51:00 PM (view original):
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/07/what-cleveland-lost-when-it-lost-lebron/59480/
This article cites a number from the Chicago Chamber of Commerce. They estimated the impact of LeBron potentially signing with the Bulls to be about $2.5 billion. I would think the reverse impact from leaving Cleveland would be a lot smaller than that, but that's a big number.
I saw that, and other contemporaneous predictions. I'd like to see a retrospective examination of what actually happened since than read about the expectations at the time.
Also, I don't have much confidence in the objectiveness or accuracy of Chamber of Commerce stuff. $2.5 billion doesn't pass the laugh test... but then that test is different for all of us.
Re: second link in your next post. The loss of state income tax dollars he would have paid is concrete and real. That's close to $1 million. That makes sense. The rest of it? Well, the money Clevelanders didn't spend in the bars and at the game still got spent. Perhaps not as much was spent locally, but nearly all of it still generated economic activity.
Obviously looking back now would give a better answer, but I just spent 30 seconds googling out of curiosity to put some actual numbers out there. The impact was clearly at least double digit millions, even if you want to be really conservative about it.
I'm not going to try to argue with you about their methods for estimating the impact. They cited economics professors from MIT and UI-Chicago, so if you don't want to take their word for it then I won't convince you otherwise.
You know what? I skimmed it because I was biased toward looking backward at it.
The MIT guy -
"They fill up the restaurants. They go to the bars after the games. They spend a lot of money," said Jerry Hausman, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied Michael Jordan's effect on the National Basketball Association. He's probably right about that. I also doubt the fans hoarded all that money, and I wonder if he addressed that end of it in his work. I know. I'm overly skeptical.
I take the UIC guy's point about the playoff revenue that otherwise wasn't coming in... except for the same concern. I'm sure some amount of that revenue is from outsiders. I don't know how much, and the gross revenue number from playoff games doesn't tell us how much of it wouldn't have been spent into Cleveland's economy anyway.
So yeah, I'd still like to see a backward-looking study. I do believe that the economic impact was greater than I initially thought. I don't believe LeBron deserves any **** over it, though.
6/21/2013 5:40 PM (edited)