Inequality in Sports

I already mentioned this in a post over at Growthology, where I have the privilege of serving as a guest blogger this week, but I thought it totally pertinent to our project here.

Mark J. Perry at Carpe Diem had this very enlightening post yesterday on home run inequality and team income inequality. He intriguingly notes how the unequal distribution of home run production in any given year matches the unequal distribution of income as documented by the IRS. Perry also had a similar post about the 80-20 rule in NBA scoring.

His point, of course, is that inequality in any human activity, including the economy, is inevitable. Our purview here at Box Score won't always include normative judgments, though I would refer readers to the Friedrich Hayek quotation I posted in the aforementioned Growthology post, as well the Kurt Vonnegut short story.

At some point in the near future we may have a post from Derek applying the insights of Hayek (one of the greatest overall thinkers of the 20th century) to our baseball analogy.

On a final note, the MLB historical stats that Perry used are likely a gold mine for future analysis on this site.