The Social Power of Open Economic Entry
Open entry is a powerful force. We see it in the free market. But we see it even more clearly in sports.
Numbers trump color in sports: points on the scoreboard. In the free market, only two colors matter: black ink and red ink. Here, everyone wants black.
THREE PHOTOS
This is from the 1965-66 NCAA Division 1 finals.
Score: Texas Western 72, Kentucky 65.
This is from the 2013-2014 NCAA Division 1 finals.
A picture is worth 1,000 words. Three pictures are worth 3,000 words. But I still have a few words to add.
They made a movie about the 1966 finals: Glory Road. The coach in the final game started an all-black team in the final game. This had never been done before in the NCAA finals. He was making a point. The point was well made. The movie's scriptwriter understood the symbolic nature of that game.
It could not have happened over the next decade. That was because of UCLA. Coach John Wooden never fielded an all-black team. Neither did North Carolina State, the only team to keep UCLA from winning a title one year in Wooden's phenomenal run. By 1976, the year after Wooden retired, there were no all-white teams that made it to the NCAA finals.
The NCAA's rules in 1966 made this incident possible.
WHO'S NUMBER ONE?
What few remember today is that almost no one thought Texas Western was the best college basketball team in the nation. No one thought Kentucky was, either. Everyone -- coaches, sports writers, and fans -- knew what best team was: the UCLA freshmen, led by Lew Alcindor (aka Kareem Abdul Jabbar), and featuring Lucius Allen, who played in the NBA for a decade. Two others on that team were extremely good players, making the varsity in later years. Alcindor and Allen had been the two most recruited high school seniors in the country a year before. In their first game, against #1-ranked UCLA varsity, they beat them 75 to 60. The next week, UCLA's varsity was still ranked #1. Everyone knew: a loss to the frosh was considered inevitable. Every coach knew what was going to happen in the next year, which it did: UCLA went undefeated. Coach Wooden, after that loss, which was broadcast on local TV, was his usual low-key self. He said of Alcindor: "Ah, the freshman. He looks pretty good." If the frosh had been allowed on the varsity, UCLA would have gone undefeated. At the end of Alcindor's sophomore year, the coaches in the NCAA outlawed the dunk in order to stop him -- a blatantly self-interested decision that led me to write "Lew Alcindor and the Gold Crisis." UCLA did lose two meaningless games over the next two years. Alcindor's teams took three NCAA championships in a row, which had never happened before.
In that third year, Coach Wooden replaced Kentucky's Adolph Rupp as the coach with the most NCAA Division 1 basketball championships: 5 to 4.
In Glory Road, Rupp is portrayed as a racist or close to it. The evidence indicates that he wasn't. But the Southeast Conference was segregated through most of the 1960's. In 1969, Rupp recruited a 7'2" black center. Things in the conference had loosened.
The South's colleges' sports teams were segregated in the mid-1960's. In the spring of 1966, Southern Methodist University recruited Jerry LeVias to play football. He was the second black player in Southwest Conference history. The first had begun playing the previous fall as a walk-on freshman at Baylor. Baylor is a private university: Baptist. SMU is also private. In his sophomore year, 1967-68, LeVias became a sensation. He continued for three seasons as a sensation. What was really sensational was his size. As a high school player, he was about 5'6" and weighed 140. He never got much larger. But he was a success in the NFL for several years. There, he uttered once of the classic lines in football history. "As the season progresses I get lighter, faster and more afraid." After 1968, college boards of trustees in the Southwest Conference and the Southeast Conference decided that they were no longer going to subsidize Grambling and Florida A&M football. The coaches were authorized to recruit blacks.
The civil rights movement softened resistance in the second half of the 1960's. The assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 sent a message: it would not be politically incorrect to continue to resist. But the lure of great black players also justified the lowering of the barriers. Alumni did not want to see their teams run off the field or off the court by teams in the league that had integrated. What the fans had tolerated for post-season bowl games -- playing against teams with blacks -- they now tolerated in league games. They wanted their teams to get to the bowl games.
What applies to sports also applies to the free market.
TRADE UNIONS
Open entry is good for consumers. It is also good for those who are normally locked out of jobs. It gives the locked-out person a potential edge: "I'll work for less money." This is an offer that businessmen find it hard to refuse.
Minimum wage laws remove this advantage. So do compulsory union rules. They always have.
In 1918, W. E. B. DuBois, the black activist who was the only black officer of the NAACP in the year it was founded, 1910, wrote this of labor unions.
That it is essentially a mischievous and dangerous program no sane thinker can deny, but is peculiarly disheartening to realize that it is the Labor Unions themselves that have given this movement its greatest impulse and that today, at last, in East St. Louis have brought the most unwilling of us to acknowledge that in the present Union movement, as represented by the American Federation of Labor, there is absolutely no hope of justice for an American of Negro descent.Personally, I have come to this decision reluctantly and in the past have written and spoken little of the closed door of opportunity, shut impudently in the faces of black men by organized white workingmen. I realize that by heredity and century-long lack of opportunity one cannot expect in the laborer that larger sense of justice and duty which we ought to demand of the privileged classes. I have, therefore, inveighed against color discrimination by employers and by the rich and well-to-do, knowing at the same time in silence that it is practically impossible for any colored man or woman to become a boiler maker or book binder, an electrical worker or glass maker, a worker in jewelry or leather, a machinist or metal polisher, a paper maker or piano builder, a plumber or a potter, a printer or a pressman, a telegrapher or a railway trackman, an electrotyper or stove mounter, a textile worker or tile layer, a trunk maker, upholster, carpenter, locomotive engineer, switchman, stone cutter, baker, blacksmith, booth and shoemaker, tailor, or any of a dozen other important well-paid employments, without encountering the open determination and unscrupulous opposition of the whole united labor movement of America. That further than this, if he should want to become a painter, mason, carpenter, plasterer, brickmaster or fireman he would be subject to humiliating discriminations by his fellow Union workers and be deprived of their own Union laws. If, braving this outrageous attitude of the Unions, he succeeds in some small establishment or at some exceptional time at gaining employment, he must be labeled as a "scab" throughout the length and breadth of the land and written down as one who, for his selfish advantage, seeks to overthrow the labor uplift of a century.
CONCLUSION
When there is open entry, discrimination has a price: forfeited profits. The consumer gets his way by buying from the seller who meets his desires at the best price. He usually does not care about the personal characteristics of those who serve him, other than their ethics and efficiency, which reduce his uncertainty.
Discrimination is not strictly economic, but it always pays an economic price. The power of price competition steadily erodes the power of non-market discrimination, i.e., discrimination based on things other than price, quantity, and quality.