Does Society Value You As Much As It Does An Athlete?

Everyone has the right to voice their opinions about virtually anything.  Not everyone has the opportunity to voice their opinions on a platform that guarantees a worldwide audience.  Everyone has the right to make a living.  Not everyone has an opportunity to make a living that is about 127 times the salary of the average citizen.

_{Can anyone justify someone being guaranteed a worldwide audience whenever they want to comment about virtually anything?  Can anyone justify someone making 127 times the national salary?  If you are a “world-class” athlete, the answers are “yes” and “yes.”  And the world-class athletes can do so because you and I enable them to.  We listen to world-class athletes spout off about anything as long as they do so with passion.  We pay big bucks to watch them in stadia, or on pay-for-view television.  Our complicity emboldens them to believe that their athletic prowess makes them capable of knowing what is right, wrong, and what “ordinary people” should believe.} 

_{An article by Jeff Zillgitt and Mark Medina of USA Today (October 17, 2019) is relevant here: “LeBron James' controversial comments 'furthers his brand power in China.'”  For those of you who missed it, James had chastised Daryl Morey, General Manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team for tweeting, “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong” when the People's Republic of China forcefully crushed dissent against the communist government.   LeBron replied to the tweet by claiming that Morey was “misinformed or not really educated on the situation” and that Morey’s comments could “put people’s livelihoods at risk.”  James apparently was speaking from his heart.  To quote Zillgitt and Medina, “LeBron James has deep, lucrative ties to China because of his partnership with Nike, which does considerable business there, both as a manufacturer and apparel seller.  The global superstar who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers has traveled to the country 15 times since he signed with the sports apparel company 16 years ago and has visited several Chinese cities promoting physical fitness, education, basketball as a unifier and of course Nike.”}

_{Obviously, I am not writing to influence you about China or even about LeBron, per se.  I simply want you to think about what many societies explicitly or implicitly value.  The financial side of the values issue is starkly obvious in the chart below:}

<sub>Notice, for instance, that the column entitled Citizen Income % of athlete for India is .000.  That is because the true number would skew the chart.  The average Indian citizen actually makes .000374074074074074 of the income of the average Indian Premier League player.  What do you think about that?  And what do you think is fair for any athlete to earn, especially since when professional athletes are interviewed they often say something like, “I love this game.  I love it so much I would play even if I had to do so for free."

You may be someone who advocates social, racial, ethnic, or gender equality.  What if we were to give athletes an income reasonably higher than average, and allocate the remainder of their previous exorbitant incomes to programs that promote the well-being of everyday citizens?</sub>

Reference

Zillgitt & Medina (2019).  LeBron James' controversial comments 'furthers his brand power in China'.  October, USA TODAY

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2019/10/17/lebron-james-nike-china-revenue/3989915002/