Hi y’all! Here are five stories from this week that contain some neat applications of economic principles or are related to teaching:
Quebec’s strategic reserve of maple syrup is running dry [CBC]
The amount of economic output paid to workers as compensation fell to the lowest-ever level recorded by the BLS [CNN Business]
The Dominican Republic produces the most pro baseball players of any country, but the pipeline to the majors has a dark side [ProPublica]
DuckDuckGo pitches itself to schools amid backlash over Google’s AI policy [TechCrunch]
Court sides with retailers in fight over billions in debit card fees [Yahoo! Finance]
LIV Golf spent more than $5 billion trying to take on the PGA Tour. Last week, it told a bankruptcy court it’s shutting down. It’s not the first rival league to lose. The USFL once won an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL and collected a total of $3. This week’s newsletter walks through why rival leagues rarely last, and why it mostly comes down to a fight over players.
LIV Golf Joins a Long List of Leagues That Took On the Incumbent and Lost
I’ve had a draft article about a golf merger sitting in my account for the past few years. In 2023, the PGA Tour looked like it would merge with the upstart LIV Golf. The two had announced a framework deal to combine forces, which looked like a textbook case of rival leagues doing what rival leagues usually do. I started writing, but held off until the …
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