Hello, my name is David and I love Fantasy Baseball. I’m in a keeper league where I have a custom built application to help me understand which players should excel next year and which are the hidden gems. I am constantly looking for new ways to stay ahead of my competitors (and I even won the league this year – regular season and playoffs!).
This isn’t a post about the virtues of Fantasy Baseball. No, I want to ask everyone why we aren’t applying advanced analytics and metrics to the rest of our lives or even the economy at large. Bill James and others once discovered that batting average tells you nothing about how good a player really is. Why aren’t the economists of today looking at our existing inflation or unemployment rates and discovering that they tell us nothing about the true health of our economy. Why isn’t there a greater debate on the virtues of new ways of analyzing our world?
The answer is probably the same problem that baseball had – the teams weren’t incentivized to change. They had established the old way, built institutions around the old way and to change would cause complete upheaval of everything. It took 20 years for advanced metrics to take hold of baseball. How long will it take before we decide our economy is important enough to evaluate the same way?