Last week, I provided an overview on a topic of vital importance: the highly uneven nature of America’s economic recovery since the Great Recession of 2008. Corporate America and its shareholders are doing very well – but the great majority of wage earners are not. What accounts for this unevenness? Noted Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw is quoted as saying, “The best way to address rising inequality is to focus on increasing educational attainment,” (The New York Times, “Income Inequality and the Ills Behind It,” July 30, 2014). Is this statement true? Or does the real answer lie elsewhere?
Tag Archives: Salaries
When Did the Tail Start Wagging the Dog?
Division I sports teams have become training programs for the pros – and the consequences for those campuses are real.
Readers from an earlier generation might remember the 1940 movie, “Knute Rockne All American,” starring Pat O’Brien as Rockne and Ronald Reagan as George Gipp. Rockne was the greatest football coach of his day – possibly the greatest ever – and he fundamentally established Notre Dame as a football power, winning four national championships between 1919 and 1930.
In 1920, George Gipp, a star player from early in Rockne’s career, died at the age of 25 of a streptococcal infection. In 1928, with Notre Dame down 6-0 to Army at the half, Rockne gave the team his famous “Gipper” speech, recalling Gipp’s (probably apocryphal) deathbed request to tell the team, some time when it was down, to “win just one for the Gipper.” Now highly motivated, Notre Dame went out for the second half, promptly scored 12 unanswered points, and won the game.
And that’s how college football used to be (at least in the movies).
Today? Not so much.