rowtheboat - George Palmer

I’ve just finished the excellent Freakonomics book. If you’ve not heard about the book the authors, an economist who dislikes Maths and a Journalist, ask unusual questions about everyday situations - does abortion effect crime rates, are estate agents telling you the truth about your house price and what really makes a good parent. On the back of such an enjoyable read I also subscribed to their blog, which although a little post heavy, does offer some good insights. One that I found of particular interest was regarding Olympic medals. Comically the American media used the total number of the medals as the medal table ranking system, and not the official number of golds, then silver, then bronze system. This of course ensured they *beat* the Chinese.

Of more interest though was this later post about calculating the medal table by country population (I have long used this argument to explain why America gets more medals than us). Pretty interesting I thought, but of course this goes deeper. There are other factors that would truly measure a nations athletic talent - national expenditure on sport and maybe even climate are two that spring to mind.

Australia, one of the best sporting nations, is still considering a review of the way they fund sport after such a dismal performance though. Using the freakonomics chart they shouldn’t be so disappointed (even if they did get beaten by New Zealand)!