Our James Harden Economy

Professional sports offer a rules-based system for competition, within which players are free to pursue whatever strategies and tactics they believe will yield victory. In this sense, sports resemble the market economy, which guarantees participants the freedom to pursue success by the means that they deem most effective, within a regulated system. Sports and markets provide a degree of creative free play—a kind of contained chaos—that generates often-surprising outcomes. Just as competition among technically superb athletes can be uniquely exciting, market economies—in rewarding brilliance, diligence, and innovation—have proved uniquely capable of generating broad societal benefits, especially when compared with centrally planned economies that try to script results, in the manner of, say, WrestleMania.