On soccer, comic books, bread, and uninteresting questions

Dan Drezner wonders out loud in Foreign Policy why great world powers aren't dominating soccer. Right now, the seven largest GDP's in the world are (in descending order): the United States, China, Germany, Japan, Russia, India and Brazil. According to FIFA, the seven best men's national soccer teams in the world are Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Italy, Germany, and Argentina. Drezner's question is: why are only two countries from the first list represented on the second? Why aren't the U.S., China, and India dominating the soccer pitch? After all, they have way more money available to invest in soccer than, say, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Argentina or Spain.

This is a really uninteresting question if I ever saw one. It's uninteresting because the answer is so obvious: cultural preferences. The U.S., India and China simply don't care as much about soccer. (Why? I don't know; that question is actually somewhat interesting.) Thinking that richer economies should, all else equal, be better at soccer than poorer ones stems from a very basic mistake: forgetting that what people (and whole economies) spend money on is a function of not just their resources, but preferences as well. Asking why China isn't one of the top three soccer powers in the world is a bit like asking why Bill Gates is not one of the largest comic book buyers in the world--after all, he has more money to spend on comic books than almost anyone else.

Back in the dark days of communism in Poland, the supply of bread and its prices were regulated by the government. When the system fell, those regulations were lifted. I remember the opponents of this arguing that regulating the supply of bread cannot be left to the market because if it is, the rich will buy up all the bread and there will not be enough left for the poor. The same mistake is at work in this objection.