A time-poor paradox: Busy people play sport

We’re in a time-poor paradox. When asked why we don’t play sport, the Bureau of Statistics says we commonly blame “lack of time” or “working too many hours”. Yet it finds those of us who play sport the most work between 40 and 50 hours per week.

It finds 88 per cent of Australians working 41 to 48 hours play sport in their spare time, compared to only 79 per cent of those working part-time 16 to 24 hours.

Commuting time is also said to make it hard to take part in amateur sport, yet the Bureau finds participation in sport the highest among the Australians who commute for more than hour to work each day. Those who play sport the least work at home.

Quality of life researcher Bob Cummins at Deakin University believes it’s to do with how work makes us feel rather than the hours it takes from our day.

“People who work more than 40 hours tend to be in jobs they like,” he says. “When people feel good about themselves they tend to feel good about engaging in physical activity.”

“At the other end people who work short hours are often not in fulfilling jobs and not where they want to be. If they don’t feel good about themselves they might not feel up to playing sport.”

The Bureau also finds that people who play sport feel safer and are more likely to agree that people can be trusted. More than half of the sports players surveyed said they felt safe when when walking alone after dark. Only 33 per cent of non sports players felt safe.

Professor Cummins believes the Bureau has identified a virtuous circle...

“If you don’t trust people, you are unlikely to feel good about playing sport with them; but the more you do it the more your trust will grow and the fitter you’ll become making you more confident about walking after dark.”

The Bureau finds 76 per cent of men and 72 per cent of women play sport regularly. Around 80 per cent of Australians aged 35 to 44 play regularly and 60 per cent of Australians of retirement age and over.

In today's Canberra Times, Sydney Morning Herald


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See. This. Movie. Moneyball

It was the best book ever written about sport and the best book ever written about business.

It's now potentially the best movie ever made about sport and the best movie ever made about business.





I can't wait.

And see Red Dog.

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How extraordinary?

(click on the graphic to enlarge)

"Each block represents a year and each column represents a range of return on the United States S&P index. Over on the right side are those lucky years where the index has soared upward from 50-60%. In the middle are the more typical years, where the market has risen less than 10%.

That little box on the far left? Yeah, that's this year." Daily Kos via Mankiw.

Now try this one - a histogram of the batting average of all the people who’ve played cricket for their country:

(click on graphic to enlarge)

"What makes it remarkable is the barely noticeable bump at the far right of the graph, indicated by a blue arrow. It shows the cricket batting average, 99.94, of one Donald Bradman, an Australian batsman who you could plausibly argue was the most outsized talent in any area of human achievement.

To understand how Bradman’s 99.94 average compares with other batsmen, consider that a typical topflight batsman has an average in the range 45 to 55. Batsmen with averages above 55 are once-in-a-generation phenomena who dominate the entire game. After Bradman, the second highest average in history belongs to South African Graeme Pollock, with 60.97, and the third highest to West Indian George Headley, with 60.83. (Current Australian batsman Michael Hussey has an average of about 70. It remains to be seen if he can keep this up.)

It’s tempting to think that the greats of other sports, people like Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretsky, and so on, must stand out just as far as Bradman. But a look at the statistics doesn’t back this up. For example, Jordan scored an average of 30.12 points per game, a monumental achievement, but only a fraction ahead of Wilt Chamberlain’s 30.07, with a somewhat larger gap to Allen Iverson, with 27.73. Following Iverson there are many others with averages of around 26 or 27 points per game." - Michael Nielsen

And here, Joshua Gans reviews Outliers: The Story of Success, in which Malcolm Gladwell argues that hard work, and the love of hard work, is what separates the merely brilliant from the brilliantly successful. Here's an extract.

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Will the Olympics boost Beijing's economy?

You can get an idea by asking whether the Olympics boosted Sydney's economy.

At Odd Numbers, Zubin Jelveh presents a persuasive answer.

Try his "spot the boost" test for yourself.

No cheating.

What was the name of that consulting firm that produced the impressive-looking study arguing that it would boost Sydney's economy?

Oh yes, KPMG.

The NSW Treasury predicted an even greater boost!

See also: Sunday dollars+sense: This'll be worth millions!

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Revenge of the Uglies

So you thought Australia was robbed? There isn't a World Cup fanatic I know who hasn't complained about the decisions of the referee these past three weeks. It's my sad duty to let you know that you are probably right to complain.

Thomas Dohmen, of the University of Bonn, has just published a study of the behaviour of German referees in 3500 matches in the 12 years to 2004. He finds that statistically they are biased in favour of whatever team happens to be playing at home. They lengthen those games in which the home team is behind and they award it more disputed and incorrect penalties than they do its opponents.

But not for the reason you might think.

What is important, Thomas finds, is not the referee's own affiliation, but unrelated factors such as the composition of the crowd, the stadium's design and the spectators' proximity to the field. Of particular importance is whether or not the match takes place in a stadium with a running track.

With a running track spectators are kept at bay and the referee is more likely to make correct decisions. Without one, referees seem to succumb to crowd pressure. As he puts it: "Referees are 10 per cent less likely to decide correctly when the game takes place in a stadium without a track."

Dohmen is not the first economist to discover that although referees are paid to be objective, their decisions are affected by the mood of the crowd around them...

In 2002 British researchers played to professional referees videotapes of an English Premier League game and asked them to decide whether or not to award a foul. One group watched the tape in silence. The other heard the crowd noise. The group that was able to hear the crowd awarded 15 per cent fewer fouls against the home side.

These economists aren't studying football for its own sake. They are examining it because it is one of the best ways of working out how we make decisions in the rest of our lives.

Do supervisors in our workplaces bend their assessments of their employees in the face of social pressure from the people around them? It is very hard to tell. But for football, where there is plenty of data, it is easy.

And as many of us who've just watched the penalty shoot-outs in the World Cup can attest, it can also tell us about our preparedness to take risks.

The economist Steven Levitt and colleagues from Stanford University and the University of Chicago have examined the direction in which players kick when they are offered a penalty.

They find that they kick the ball straight down the middle much less often than they should if their aim was to maximise the chance of getting a goal. Why choose the more risky route or kicking to the right or the left rather than going straight down the middle?

As Levitt puts it: "If you kick it right down the middle and you don't score, it is damn embarrassing. So even though the middle is a great play statistically, kickers don't choose it very often. There are some things that are even more important than winning, like not looking like a fool."

It is an extraordinary finding, because in professional sport decisions are meant to be about results, not feelings. The players are paid incredibly well, their every move is documented and an awful lot depends on the outcome. And yet they are prepared to compromise it in order to avoid being embarrassed.

It is common in US baseball as well. Three years ago Michael Lewis published Moneyball, described in some reviews as the best book about sport ever written. In it he documents the rise of the California's Oakland As, one of the poorest teams in the league. Instead of choosing its players on the basis of gut feel (where the decisions of its scouts might succumb to social or peer pressure) it used a laptop and cold hard stats.

The players it chose were more likely to take risks that might make them look foolish. Because of that they did better.

But they looked appalling. Most looked nothing like the jocks chosen by the teams with big money. They were lanky, fat, old or slow. And cheap, with few inhibitions.

It was a strategy that enabled the Oakland As, the league's second-poorest team, to win more regular season games than any other, with the exception of the Atlanta Braves.

Moneyball only appears to be a book about sport. It is actually a book about business. At one point Lewis asks: if professional sporting managers get so much so spectacularly and expensively wrong in a field in which there are clearly defined rules and massive documentation, what does that say about other fields, such as fund management, in which there are few rules and almost no documentation of minute-by-minute decisions?

Might the lowly paid administrators of non-profit industry funds do better than the big boys running the professional for-profit funds whose reputations are at stake? Might what applies to the business of sport apply to business more generally? The bigger your reputation, and the more you know you are being watched, the worse will be your decisions.

In those circumstances, might the best way to make decisions be as an ugly misfit, as were the players for the Oakland As. Or might it be to "turn down the sound" as did the referees in Britain?

Or, in the words of the country music ballad, to "dance like there's nobody watching, sing like there's nobody listening, and love like you'll never be hurt".

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The law of small numbers

Today on Life Matters I used the excuse of the grand finals to speak to Rebecca Gorman about what psychologist Amos Tverski calls "The Law of Small Numbers.''

It is an ironic reference. The so-called law of big numbers states correctly that when an experiment such as a coin toss is repeated (say) thousands of times, heads will come up about half the time.

Tverski finds that people wrongly believe this bo be the case for very small numbers as well.

If a couple has two children, both of them girls, people attach significance to this. It must be in the man's genes. Yet this is highly likely (25 per cent) to happen just by chance.

When it comes to runs of heads, they are far more likely than we think. If you toss a coin 20 times, a run of 4 heads in a row (somewhere in the sequence) is extremely likely - the probability of that happening by chance alone is about 50 per cent!

But Tverski thinks that because we are victims of belief in "the law of small numbers" we feel the need to attach significance to a run of four wins in a row.

In sport in the US, this is called belief in "the hot hand". Tverski has shown that for basketball in the US the hot hand seems not to exist. Sone study reports that after a run of successes a certain player had a 75 per cent chance of having another success. After a run of failures the player also had a 75 per cent chance of success.

Neither players nor their supporters believe this.

We seem to have an almost programmed-in need to look for meaning in what might be meaningless noise....

Even the Australian Bureau of statistics publishes trend estimates, some of which are meaningless. I remember in 1993 that the direction of the trend for the current account deficit used to point up in some months, down in others. In reality the underlying movement in the current account deficit probably wasn't changing at all.

Which brings us to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and its position paper on the advertising of investment returns. ASIC wants the rules governing the advertising of past performance tightened up.

It has commissioned a survey from the Financial Policy Research Centre which examines 100 surveys of the performance of funds managers over time. It says about half of the studies found no correlation at all between good past and future performance. "Good performance seems to, at best, a weak and unreliable predictor of good performance over the longer term."

There are all sorts of reasons why this should be the case. Without knowledge that the market doesn't have (which is illegal in equities) it should be impossible to consistently better predict where the market will end up than the market itself. An investment style which works in one set of market conditions may not work in the next. Successful funds managers will face a run on their staff, everyone will copy them, they will believe their hype. (Remember BT?)

I said on Life Matters that if a firm wins "Funds Manager of the Year" two years in a row, ditching it might be as good advice as keeping it.

Tverski points out that for sport there is no reason why a run of wins shouldn't signal something, it is just that the statistics show that it doesn't.

I must say that I personally found Tverski's findings about perception challenging. Until now I must have believed (subconsciously) that "god's hand" manipulates the outcome of a coin toss to ensure that a run of heads is always followed by a run of tails. I now see (late) that that isn't how it happens. A run of heads isn't reversed by the hand of god, its effect is diluted over time by other results, so that when the number of tosses gets very large the results are about 50-50. (If you toss a coin and get five heads in a row, and then keep tossing until you have tossed 1,000 times in total, probablity theory does not predict that the total number of heads will be 500, it predicts that the number will be about 502.)

Actually I still find the workings of probability hard to get my head around. Perhaps because I know from quantum physics that the hand of god does manipulate the results of wave/particle experiments to give us the result it wants us to see. So maybe our intuitive belief in a hand of god isn't so wrong after all.

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