Charles Wheelan, Ph.D. The Naked Economist

President Barack Obama is working with the Russians on some kind of nuclear arms reduction treaty. If he is successful on that front, perhaps he can turn his attention to a different arms race:  Youth sports.

Believe it or not, there is a striking parallel between countries pouring money into weapons systems, firms competing for customers and parents pushing their young kids to play sports younger, faster, harder and longer.  They all consume a lot of resources without necessarily leaving anyone better off.  In fact, all parties might have been better off if the "competition" had never started in the first place.

Economists use "arms race" to describe any situation in which some competition leads to a bad outcome for all the parties involved.

Here's how it works with a real arms race: A country enjoys a strategic advantage if it has more (or better) weapons than another country.  The key insight is that only relative advantage matters.  If the U.S. has one nuclear weapon and Russia has none, then the U.S. has a crucial military edge.

Russia won't stand for that, so they build more nukes, prompting the U.S. to invest in defense technology to preserve its military advantage.  So imagine that 10 years later the U.S. has 50,000 warheads and the Russians have 50,000 warheads, but the U.S. has developed a missile defense system that once again restores its military superiority. 

Here's the futility of the arms race:  Both countries would have been better off if they had just stuck with the situation in which the U.S. had one nuke and the Russians had none.  Instead, they both spend hundreds of billions of dollars to end up in exactly the same strategic place.

Who Are the Winners?

You can see the same thing with United Airlines and American Airlines, or Coke and Pepsi.  These companies would like to gain market share from their competitors -- but they also desperately want to avoid a "price war."  If United tries to gain traction in a particular market with lower fares, American will reciprocate by matching or beating those fares.  The two companies will likely end up with roughly the same market share that they started with, but much lower profits.

This is good for consumers, obviously, but potentially bankrupting for airlines.  This is why antitrust law helps the rest of us by forbidding airlines from doing what would otherwise make them better off -- colluding to keep prices high.

So what does this have to do with Little League?  I'm convinced that young athletes (or, more accurately, their parents) are locked in an arms race.  Or a price war, if you prefer that analogy. In any case, the youth sports competition could leave all our kids worse off, not entirely unlike bankrupt airlines or countries struggling to manage huge defense budgets.

I have heard the same complaint over and over again since becoming a parent:  kids' sports are becoming ridiculously competitive.  There are 8-year-olds with private hitting coaches, and 9-year-olds being told that they have no future in a sport if they are not playing in competitive leagues during the off-season.

Young boys and girls are suffering from repetitive stress injuries that used to show up only in professional athletes.  The era of the three-season high school athlete is at risk because serious athletes are expected to specialize in one sport and train year-round.

An increasing number of teen-agers are getting Tommy John surgery (named for Major League pitcher Tommy John).  This is a radical procedure to repair a ligament tear in the elbow by replacing it with a tendon harvested from somewhere else in the body.  Teen-agers are having the surgery more often because they are being urged to throw harder and more often, and to throw pitches that put particular strain on young arms, such as curveballs and sliders.

Creating New Problems

If all of this makes kids and young families happier than they were 20 years ago, terrific.  But I don't think that's what is going on.  As far as I can tell, sports have three purposes: To get exercise, to have fun or to get your kid into college, earn a scholarship, turn professional and become rich and famous.

The evolution in youth sports appears to be mostly about the third one.  Here's the problem with that:  The number of scholarships (and college athletes) is more or less fixed.  So is the number of professional athletes and the total amount of money to be won on the PGA Tour.

If everyone practices three times as much, the same folks will probably end up with the scholarships, prize money and Nike endorsements.  And if we assume that the extra practice, coaching and spending on equipment comes at the expense of other things (like riding a bike for fun, playing other sports or doing something really crazy like playing "kick the can" in the backyard for a few hours), then our kids' lives are worse for it.

But no one alone can stop what is going on in youth sports.  That's the insidious part of an arms race or a price war.  If you are the only family who pulls your kid out of winter Little League, then he is going to do poorly relative to other kids who play year-round.  And if your child really is exceptionally talented, then he will have no shot at a scholarship or other success that he may deserve from a talent standpoint.

But it gets even more perverse.  Suppose everyone else does regain their sanity and vows to cut back on the crazy sports schedules.  Then the rational strategy is to be the one who practices twice as much, because then your kid might get the tennis scholarship, even if she's not the most talented.

Of course as soon as everyone starts thinking that way, we're back to the youth sports arms race.

It's crucial to recognize the difference between intensive athletic practices and something like studying.  Competitive athletic success is a zero sum game.  There will be the same number of major league players making the same salaries if everyone in the world became twice as good at playing baseball.  A-Rod would still be on the Yankees, not you.  He'd just be twice as good as he is now.

Studying, on the other hand, makes people smarter, more educated and more productive.  And that makes your life better, regardless of what everyone else is doing.  Economic productivity is not a zero sum game.  If we all became twice as smart, we would all be richer, healthier, safer and so on.  As the United States became steadily more educated and richer over the past 200 years, no one on the planet had to get poorer.

Searching for Sanity

Competitive sports are a zero sum game.  If your child gets a scholarship to play football at the University of Michigan, it's likely that some other kid won't get that scholarship.

An arms race is a form of collective irrationality, and it usually requires some kind of binding institutional solution to stop it (such as an arms agreement).

Similarly, in business, firms would prefer to strike agreements to prevent price wars -- but it's against the law.

Ironically, our professional athletes are protected from the arms race.  The agreement between the Major League Baseball owners and the Players Association stipulates that spring training cannot begin more than 33 days prior to the start of the season.

The collective bargaining agreement between the National Football League owners and the Players Association limits off-season workouts to 14 weeks, with no more than four workouts per week and no contact.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) limits the number of hours that college athletes can practice, both in season and out of season.

Why do these agreements exist?  Because otherwise these super-competitive college and pro athletes would seek advantages by practicing longer and harder.  They'd end up exhausted, hurt and probably in the same place in the standings. 
 
Our six-year-old Little Leaguers have less institutional protection -- binding rules to keep them from getting hurt or burning out -- than the Yankees.

I'm moved by the advice of Tommy John, the guy for whom the surgery is named that teen-age pitchers are now getting in record numbers.  What does a former Major League pitcher, obviously a talented, competitive guy, have to say about the state of youth sports? 

He told MSNBC, "Just let the kids be kids."