The following question is from a course called "Foundations of real world Economics" which focuses on shortcomings of mainstream economics and the effect it has on society. It also discusses how in reality economics actually works. The following is a question that focuses on how a wage of a highly successful sports person is determined.

Question 19 0 out of 1 Kobe Bryant earns $28 million because Answer a. S: He is a good basketball player. b. The NBA is a legally sanctioned cartel and therefore earn monopoly profits. C Because his team does not have to pay for the internet created at taxpayers' expense. View answer and explanation VTechnological change associated with the IT revolution has generally benefited some occupations and not others. For instance, in 1980, major league baseball players earned about ten times as much as K-12 teachers. However, by the year 2000 the salary of the average baseball player increased to 45 times that of teachers, because the Internet enabled a much larger audience to view the games.40 This is obviously way out of line, because the contribution of teachers to social welfare is considerably larger than that of sportsmen, and the only reason that they could earn such humongous salaries is that the market for sports enjoys a number of privileges including exemptions from antitrust laws as well as public subsidies to sport stadiums and communications networks and technology. In other words, the value of baseball players-and this is true for CEOs and other celebrities-is not determined only by their own efforts but is also on the contributions of society which also owns the airwaves through which the signals travel. So it would be justified to put a surtax on those occupations that benefited from basic research sponsored by government so that the taxpayers earn a return on their investment. The value created by a football game is produced jointly by the players and the society. Therefore, income distribution is not determined by market forces alone but also by institutional structures and prevailing laws. If sport is treated as a privileged industry and is exempt from antitrust legislation, the ten players in the NBA who earned more than $27 million in salary alone in 2017 should not reap the monopoly rents of that legislation.41 They would not be earning such astronomical salaries without these laws. Their salaries are not the product of free-market supply-and-demand forces but of the laws that allow sport associations to be legal cartels. The structure of these mega-sports protects the teams from competition and allows them to have monopoly power and earn monopoly rents. Of course, they can earn extraordinary salaries from these monopoly rights. Is that privilege for sports fair? Even if this might be a reasonable way to organize sports, there is no reason why the players should profit from the legislation. Their salaries are not the outcome of their own achievements alone. Sportsmen should not profit from the Internet more than average workers. They are lucky that their occupation benefited from the Internet, and in a fair society wages would not be a function of chance, according to Rawls. The argument applies to Hollywood celebrities as well as to the Lords of Wall Street. The annual compensation (in millions) earned in 2016 by the likes of Lloyd Blankfein ($20), Jamie Dimon ($27), or Marissa Mayer ($27) were not even at the top of the list. Many earned two to three times as much (all with taxpayers' assistance).42 Even college presidents have joined the millionaires club.43 Their salaries would not be on that order of magnitude if the market for CEOs or college presidents were perfectly competitive. They are not paid their opportunity cost. Even those CEOs who ran their companies into the ground received astronomical salaries and bonuses. For instance, John Thain received $83 million just before Merrill Lynch became insolvent.44 His predecessor left the firm with a golden parachute of $159 million although the firm was losing some $8 billion.45 This evidence defies the theory that the wages of these CEOs equal the value of their marginal product