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A review by mattycakesbooks
Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski
4.0
Pretty solid. It's basically what you'd expect: like Moneyball or Freakonomics but with soccer. There are a few chapters that are significantly more interesting than the others - the chapter on the correlation between sporting losses and suicides is particularly interesting, as is the chapter on whether or not World Cups are beneficial for the host countries - but overall, pretty interesting.
It's part of this growing trend to introduce big data to everything, and while I think the trend in general is a good thing, I also feel the need to point out that while economists are very good at making quantitative judgments - showing, for example, that communities don't actually recoup their investments from stadiums - they aren't as good at making qualitative, moral judgments. Not that I think anything the writers of Soccernomics (this comment is aimed as much at Freakonomics as it is at this book) suggest is blatantly immoral, but economics is an amoral field, and while it does a great job at shattering myths and misconceptions, economics can only really serve as a starting point for debating the morality of a situation. Data isn't a moral entity, it's just data, and efficiency in itself isn't necessarily a moral concept.
It's part of this growing trend to introduce big data to everything, and while I think the trend in general is a good thing, I also feel the need to point out that while economists are very good at making quantitative judgments - showing, for example, that communities don't actually recoup their investments from stadiums - they aren't as good at making qualitative, moral judgments. Not that I think anything the writers of Soccernomics (this comment is aimed as much at Freakonomics as it is at this book) suggest is blatantly immoral, but economics is an amoral field, and while it does a great job at shattering myths and misconceptions, economics can only really serve as a starting point for debating the morality of a situation. Data isn't a moral entity, it's just data, and efficiency in itself isn't necessarily a moral concept.