Unfriendly Ghost
Kasper
Analysis | British economists prove it: Sports destroy happiness
Pretty interesting stuff. Sometimes I feel this way, in that every time the Wings do something to undercut the rebuild, I get way more irritated compared to the happiness I feel when they do something right.
But could this suggest that rebuilding on the fly is a better strategy to maximize long-term fan happiness? Sure, you never win, but winning doesn't do that much. It's only that losing hurts too much, so the minimization of loss is what really matters in the end. Was it better to be a Calgary fan than a Chicago fan over the last 15 years?
Sports make the world a sadder place. Seriously. We’ve got data.
Armed with 3 million responses to a happiness monitoring app, plus the locations and times of several years worth of British soccer matches, University of Sussex economists Peter Dolton and George MacKerron calculated that the happiness that fans feel when their team wins is outweighed – by a factor of two – by the sadness that strikes when their team loses.
Pretty interesting stuff. Sometimes I feel this way, in that every time the Wings do something to undercut the rebuild, I get way more irritated compared to the happiness I feel when they do something right.
But could this suggest that rebuilding on the fly is a better strategy to maximize long-term fan happiness? Sure, you never win, but winning doesn't do that much. It's only that losing hurts too much, so the minimization of loss is what really matters in the end. Was it better to be a Calgary fan than a Chicago fan over the last 15 years?