Your taxes hard at work.. uhm I mean at play

I don’t think it would be reasonable to contemplate the legitimacy if this even if social services were adequate and poverty was low. In that case, assuming all other responsibilities of government are taken care of, there is no reason for the government to do anything with any extra money other than return it to the taxpayers. I mean, a race car?!

Will, you’re probably right.. I was trying to leave some room for possible interpretations of this decision I may have missed.

I think the idea behind it is that Hungary is a tiny country in need of any publicity it can get. Or maybe it’s about building national pride by having someone to cheer for during Formula One races. Now as to whether having a participant in such a race really builds any useful PR for a country or how it influences national pride (and whether that’s really a legit goal or a good thing) especially in contrast to other ways in which that money could be spent.. well, that’s where I seem to disagree with the politicians involved.

“Hungary has a ‘sports minister’?”

The fact that an economy like Hungary has a sports minister isint especially remarkable.
India, which probably ranks lower in terms of social indicators than Hungary, has one (the same minister is also in charge of `youth affairs’). More significantly, there is a whole sprawling bureaucracy which backs him up.
And btw, even the state of Andhra, in India is lobbying for an F1 track to be set up in the city of Hyderabad. Though i’m not sure how much money, if any, has been spent in the lobbying process…apart from a state funded trip to Italy, that is… ;)

>>Official says India looks to host Formula One Grand Prix race

September 03, 2003
HYDERABAD, India (AP) – A government delegation will travel to Italy next week in a bid to convince Formula One to add an Indian Grand Prix to its race circuit, a government official said Wednesday.
The delegation will make a presentation to Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone, outlining facilities available in Hyderabad, the capital of the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, said state chief minister Chandrababu Naidu. Ecclestone will be in Italy to attend the Italian Grand Prix at Monza.
The meeting follows an invitation to Naidu from the Formula One authority to discuss the size of the event and requirements for hosting it.
The Grand Prix would give a tremendous boost to the state’s infrastructure and tourism, Naidu told reporters.
The state government already has held two rounds of talks with Formula One representatives.
Circuit designer Hermann Tilke, who conceived the Grand Prix race tracks in Bahrain and Malaysia, as well as the Chinese city of Shanghai, recently visited India.

By the account here the Pentagon has also mislaid “56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units” – at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/05/18/MN251738.DTL&type=printable

More to the thread theme, has no one noticed that governing regimes with totalitarian pretentions almost invariably promote national prowess in sports and sponsor a state movie-making industry? Remember that much of present concerns over performance-enhancing drugs in sport arose out of the heavy prescription of steroids to athletes in East Germany and the training up of folks of questionable gender to compete as female athletes led to gender tests. All that suggests an obsession with national image over the spirit of friendly rivalry.

I think JE Thelin hit it on the head. It’s easy to see the powers-that-be deciding to take the Hungaroring Grand Prix away and giving it to China or somebody. That GP is the only thing that got me to Hungary, and probably a lot of other people too. So I assume the investment is aimed at that.

Roman emperors came to understand well the effective political recipe for minimising those plebian discontents which could lead to revolting consequences: Bread and circuses.

Dan Simon —

Great points.

Marathons, javelins, disci, Jamaican bobsleds for crying out loud, which most people found endearing and fun, though Jamaica’s economic picture at the time wasn’t all roses and apples. What jars is the serious power of Formula1. It’s an exclusive club for the privileged and their suitably respectful wannabes. Hungary officially sanctioning their own car and driver is unseemly. It’s the little guy claiming too big a share of the masculine glamor. Some colonial parvenu pretending to be James Bond.
But almost everyone these days climbs in and out of automobiles. When’s the last time you threw a spear?
Aren’t the Olympics a celebrating of excellence at what were once common activites?
What’s more common than driving? Eating?
Say, how about somehow combining bread AND circuses into one highly entertaining competition everyone could enter? We could feed the (qualifying) poor and entertain them at the same time.

Dan Simon – what you seem to be referring to here is the difference between what some who study culture would distinguish as “highbrow” vs “lowbrow” culture. You are suggesting that Rothko would be highbrow and thus okay for some whereas Formula One may be considered lowbrow and thus not okay for those same people. Had my post been about the Hungarian government’s subsidy of Hungarian pop music (which also exists) then this would be a more legit critique. But my post wasn’t about that. It was about sports.

One could probably argue that various sports could be considered “highbrow” or “lowbrow”. And then you could’ve suggested that if they were sponsoring someone’s entry into a more highbrow sport then perhaps I wouldn’t be complaining (but how can you know that?).

I think comparing across domains (from arts to sports) is a bit of a stretch.

And no, anthropologists are not the only ones for whom culture is “useful” as Danny puts it.:) [that’s a pdf link]

Another thing to note is that, as far as government financed boondoggles go, $4 million is relatively cheap.

Had the plan instead been something that involved construction of a building – a cultural center, say – it likely would have cost at least $10 million. And, these days, it probably would have involved Frank Gehry and a goopy titanium monstrosity.

Worst case, you have ill-considered things like the UK’s millenium dome. Even for a wealthy country, that billion pounds could surely have been better spent.

A Formula 1 team might not be the wisest expenditure, but it surely could have been far, far worse.

Dan, I probably took the discussion in the wrong direction. The Rothko example wasn’t a good analogy for other reasons either. If the gov’t decided to pay a person $4 million to travel somewhere and take a look at a Rothko painting (or take a course in Rothko-style painting) that would have been a better analogy, in my opinion. The gov’t is sponsoring one participant in a race here. The benefit to the masses from that one person’s participation is unclear. Formula One is already broadcast in Hungary so people already have access to watching the race. There is even a racetrack in Hungary (referred to by others in this thread: Hungaroring) so interested parties have relatively easy means to going and watching the race in person (e.g. they don’t have to travel abroad). This money is going towards one person’s participation in it. It is not a public good in that sense, it serves one private individual. I did not articulate this point clearly earlier, thanks for pushing me on it.

I’ve got to agree with Dan here, which is surely one of the signs of the apocalypse.

The presumed benefit from the Rothko would be that people in Hungary could go see it, which they would consider to be valuable. The presumed benefit from the F1 sponsorship is that Hungarians can derive pleasure/national pride from knowing that one of their own is racing in F1–and watching him on TV, I guess. Now, I have no idea whether more people in Hungary would prefer to have their money spent on a Rothko or on F1, but I don’t see any a priori reason why one expenditure would be legitimate and the other not.

Incidentally, I note that Hungary sent a team to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, and in fact collected 17 medals. I’m suspecting that Hungary spends much more than $4 million on Olympic athletes (off the top of my head, I’d guess that it’s about 50-100k/athlete) Although there are of course more than 1 athletes, this still strikes me as a case where a relatively large sum of money is being spent to benefit a small number of athletes, again presumably with the rationale of national pride. Is it the principle of the thing or just the amount you object to?

Well, it’s always tough to draw tight analogies that only let you focus on the point you’re trying to make. But, no, I wasn’t trying to suggest that Hungarians would have pride in Rothko, but rather that they would enjoy seeing his painting. That’s one variety of benefit. Pride in one’s countryman (in the F1 case) is another. It seems to me that you’re arguing that one variety of benefit is inherently superior to the other. Is that not your argument?

You make two points wrt the Olympics:
(1) That people represent their country, as opposed to F1, where people represent themselves.
(2) That there is no limit on participants.

While I agree that point (1) is formally true, I think it is practically false. People seem to have an enormous pride in their countrymen or women when they participate in international sporting events, whether or not they are competing as part of some national team. Consider, for instance, the pride that Lance Armstrong has aroused in American cycling enthusiasts. Now, it’s true that Lance is riding for USPS, so that does muddy the water a bit, but there was a similar reaction to Greg Lemond, even when he was riding for La Vie Claire.

(2) It’s true that in principle there are an unlimited number of drivers from any country but in practice, there appear to be about 20 active drivers total whereas any given country probably has an Olympic team in excess of 20 people. So, I think it’s quite plausible that some Hungarians would feel national pride in a Hungarian participating.

I take your second paragraph to be primarily an argument that Hungarians are unlikely to take pride in seeing a Hungarian in F1. However, are you saying that *even if they did anyway* this would be an illegitimate expenditure? If not, then it seems that we’re really discussing whether they do take pride in it, in which case that seems like an appropriate matter on which the government should be making judgement calls, no?

In a freestanding sense I find this insane on so many levels I hardly know where to start, but in a comparative sense I don’t see any difference between what the Hungarians are doing and what every other major (and some not so major) government does when it comes to sports.

Except for one minor point: What if the Hungarian driver not only sucks, but gets himself killed in the process? This is not a problem that you face when you send an Ilie Nastase out there with a racket.

Zizka: I can’t decide if it is sadder to watch the public purse robbed on playboxes for millionare and billionaires, or to contemplate the fawning over top high school atheletes vis. equally outstanding scholars.

D. Chris — yeah, if you have your country’s hopes pinned on a single hero in a blood sport, there’s the possibility of having it backfire. But the Hungarian libertarians will certainly have an answer ready.

F1 may be a fast and essentially dangerous sport, but aside from two accidents killing trackside workers (one of which was an unfortunate one-in-a-million freak event), there have been no fatalities in the sport since 1994.

This isn’t new. Malaysia sponsored the Stewart F1 team for a few years, and also sponsored Minardi when Malaysian driver Alex Yoong was behind the wheel in 2002.

Several state enterprises have sponsored teams, as far back as Saudia Airlines sponsoring Williams in the early 80s – when bin Laden enterprises was also a Williams sponsor :-)

Not to defend this action, but $4 million is a drop in the bucket comapred to public expenditures on stadiums in North America. Hell, in Pittsburgh public funding of new stadiums was defeated by initiative, yet the pols still figured out a way to get public dollars into them.