This argument makes some sense, but it would make a lot more sense if we set broader and more consistent limits. Yet we don’t at all limit housework, and place few limits on self-employed work. Furthermore, high status occupations are especially exempt. Doctors, lawyers, managers, financiers, artists, writers, athletes, academics, and software engineers often work crazy hours. Yet the signaling argument would seem to apply nearly as well if not better to such high status work. Why are we so selective in our limits?

One explanation is a battle for relative status between professions and activities. Areas where work hours are limited produce less, and so look less impressive. Ambitious folks who want to show their high abilities then choose other areas, leading to an equilibrium were observers reasonably less respect folks who work in limited areas. On this story, work hour limits were set in manufacturing and manual labor in order to reduce the status of such activities.

A second related explanation is that each society is eager to look good to other societies. So each society prefers to encourage, not discourage, activities that are especially visible to outsiders. When outsiders evaluate societies more on the basis of their athletes than their shop technicians, societies naturally subsidize the former relative to the latter.

Another third explanation is that voters support limits on work hours in some jobs mainly as a way to defy and “stick it to” employers, who are seen as evil and in need of taking down. Firms who employ low status workers may themselves seem lower status and “exploitive,” and thus more acceptable targets of ire. Work hour limits serve as a quantity limit which raises wages and thus employer expenses. Any reduction of signaling losses is nice, but mainly a side effect.

Researchers tracked men and women from a rural village in Mexico as they foraged for mushrooms. … Men were less efficient–they traveled farther, went higher, and exerted more effort than women for the same amount of mushrooms. Women also collected a greater variety of mushrooms from more sites. This pattern is consistent with the theory that, during the hunter-gatherer period of human evolution, women honed spatial skills needed for gathering while men honed spatial skills needed for hunting. (more)

Now sports let us show off many kinds of physically-expressed abilities. But it seems to me that most sports emphasize hunting skills, such as chasing, evading, throwing, and hitting, far more than gathering skills, such as visual search and fine finger control. Now it makes sense for men to prefer hunting sports, but oddly females also seem to prefer them; pretty much all sports emphasize hunting more than gathering skills. Why don’t women prefer sports designed to show off the skills for which female bodies were designed?

Now men do seem more keen to show off than women, who seem more keen to observe and evaluate. So we should expect to see more men than women doing sports. And if the fixed costs of creating a sport were high enough, there’d be only one or two sports to play, and they might all be tuned for men. But this hardly describes our world.

Men also seem in general to have more skill variance than women. So if only a small fraction of people, the very best few, played sports, we might expect most of them to be men, even in sports that emphasized gathering skills.  We might prefer sports that show off male skills best, if would be mostly men playing no matter what the sport was. But in fact most people, including most women, play sports, at least during their school years.

So why do both men and women prefer sports that emphasize male hunting type physical skills, over female gathering type skills? Looking for parallels, I notice that women are said to look good in male-style clothes (e.g., suits), far more than men are said to look good in female-style clothes (e.g., dresses). Women also earn more respect succeeding at male-dominated professions than men earn by succeeding at female-dominated professions.

The general pattern in all three cases is that we seem to respect women doing well at what mostly men do far more than we respect men doing well at what mostly women do. For better or worse, male abilities seem to more define which abilities count most for high status. Doesn’t seem fair to women, but there it is.

Added 12a: Yes there are activities that are like gathering.  But to be a sport, an activity must be scored and publicly ranked.

Added 5p: The main puzzle is school girl sports, as adult women do far less sport. The main alternative would be to make fem kids be physically active, but in some more fem like gathering way.  Perhaps this is part of how schools acclimate kids to being ranked – the quick and easy way to do that for girls was to make girls compete in male sports.   Inventing competitive gathering type sports would have taken a lot more work.

It’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. … The actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them. … Note the way “up close and personal” profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life — outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce.

This seems to me yet another example of people picking on nerds more because nerds are widely disliked.

Added 11a: Many suggest that “get a life” means “get popular, high status.”  OK, I can buy that.

Somewhere along the line, someone gave me the impression that boxing gloves made boxing safer. I learned to look down on ignorant ancestors or lowlifes who boxed with bare-knuckles. But in fact, we’ve known for a century that gloves make boxing far more dangerous:

The Marquess of Queensberry rules [requiring boxing gloves] took off not because society viewed the new sport as more civilised than the old, but because fights conducted under the new guidelines attracted more spectators. Audiences wanted to see repeated blows to the head and dramatic knockouts.

By contrast,… “In 100 years of bare-knuckle fighting in the United States, which terminated around 1897 … there wasn’t a single ring fatality.” Today, there are three or four every year in the US, and around 15 per cent of professional fighters suffer some form of permanent brain damage during their career. … A return to bare knuckles would be bloodier and less acceptable to mass television audiences, but one has to ask whether wheelchairs and life-support machines are any easier on one’s conscience.

Imagine proposing to your friends that they attend a bloody bare-knuckles fight, or mentioning to them that you had done so. I expect that for most folks, doing so would risk more social shame than for glove boxing. But why, if glove boxing is more dangerous?

Yes, perhaps most folks don’t know glove boxing hurts more, but how could such easily understood info of such wide relevance remain hidden for so long? It seems hard to escape the conclusion that we just don’t want to know.

What about athletes? While we may not hold athletes to the high of standards we hold politicians, we clearly hold them to higher standards than musicians. Tiger Woods was vilified for moral violations that wouldn’t be worth reporting about a musician. Yet the above explanation for politicians vs. musicians doesn’t work here. While we are no more vulnerable to athletes than to musicians, we still hold athletes to a higher standard.

For our distant ancestors, athletic skill was much closer to political power. Small forager bands feared that the few most physically powerful members would attempt to dominate the band by force. Foragers had much less reason to fear domination by the few most musical folks in the band. So it made sense for foragers to hold athletes to higher moral standards than musicians.

So I suspect our tendency to hold athletes to higher standards than musicians is a holdover from our forager days; I’d explain similarly the fact that it is easier for an athlete than a musician to covert into a politician.

We can understand why we treat different kinds of celebrities differently today in terms of reasons our distant forager ancestors had to treat them differently.  Can this approach help us understand our differing treatments of other kinds of celebrities?

Added 7p: The fact that athletes are held up as role models seems less an explanation for them being held to higher standards, and more as a restatement of the question. I’m not saying athletes are actually more moral, just that they are punished more severely when caught.  I think the fact that we tolerate far more subjectivity in judging musicians than athletes is also related, but I’m not sure how.

Also, when have little personally at stake, we support underdogs in sports, politics, and business. We overestimate their chances, and think them relatively hard-working, likable, virtuous, and beautiful. A sports team who is likely to win but gets paid less, however, is the underdog – dominance is more about overall gains than wins. But if we think a contest is close or important, such as if a business is close to home or if lives are on the line, we prefer overdogs. Details:

Two teams, A and B, were meeting in a best-of-seven playoff series for some unidentified sport, and Team A was “highly favored” to win. Which team would the students root for? Eighty-one percent chose the underdog. Then the students were asked to imagine that Team B had somehow managed to win the first three games of the series. … Half of those who first picked the underdog now said they’d support Team A. …

[Researchers] invited students to read a fake newspaper article about an upcoming rugby match. According to the article, odds makers had given one of the teams just a 30 percent chance of victory. When asked to make their own predictions, the students were more optimistic. Instead of pegging the underdog’s odds at 30 percent, they guessed it was more like 41 percent. If the article specifically referred to the disadvantaged team as an “underdog,” the effect was even stronger, with the students pegging the chance of victory at 44 percent. .. Replacing the rugby teams with mayoral candidates and then a pair of businesses competing for a contract, … the results were the same. …

Our love for the little guy is as much a judgment of character as an emotional investment. … Two-thirds of all voters in the 2004 presidential election described their preferred candidate as the “underdog.” … Presidential candidates were deemed more likable after being characterized as an “underdog”. … Being cast as the underdog can make your actions seem more virtuous and your face appear more beautiful. …

One side was described as the 9-to-1 favorite, having won each of 15 previous playoff matches. After viewing [video] footage … the underdogs were characterized as having less “talent” and “intelligence” than the favorites but more “hustle” and “heart.” That was true even when subjects viewed the same video clip with the labels reversed. … In fact, recent data suggest that the underdogs might be dogging it. …

Two teams, A and B, are about to play an important match, for which Team A was the odds-on (7-to-3) favorite. … The students were to imagine that the players on Team A had lower salaries than the ones on Team B—their payrolls were $35 million and $100 million, respectively. … Two-thirds supported the favorite, Team A. … This was evidence that inequity aversion drives the underdog effect, “above and beyond” emotional self interest. …

A pair of companies were vying for a contract to test the drinking water in far-off Boise, Idaho. One was a large, well-established firm founded 30 years ago; the other was an eager startup. … People were inclined toward the underdog. But … if the subjects were told that the water in question might contain “cancer-causing mercury,” the underdog effect disappeared. And if the site of the water testing was changed from “Boise, Idaho” to somewhere in their own community, … subjects started rooting against the underdog.

Our affinity for the lesser team “is a mile wide and an inch deep. … We may feel morally good about rooting for the underdog, but our positive reaction is quite malleable.” … Perhaps that’s why the underdog seems most at home in the trivial world of team sports. With nothing much at stake, we’re free to indulge an idle preference for an upset. “At an unconscious level, we know we don’t take underdogs all that seriously.”

With [Major League Baseball]’s adoption of mandatory testing for steroids, many thought that home run rates would drop dramatically. They didn’t, and many felt that the lack of a test for HGH could be part of the explanation. Well, it’s time for the scientists working on such a test to start something else more important.

That is John Bradbury.  He interprets:

The illegality of growth hormone actually promotes its use in sports. … The banning of a drug by anti-doping authorities sends a loud and incorrect signal that it works. … Therefore, I believe that legalizing growth hormone is needed to send the signal that it doesn’t work, largely to undo the widespread common belief that growth hormone does improve performance. … Think of the powerful effect it would have if MLB pulled growth hormone off its banned list. I can’t imagine a more powerful signal of a drug’s lack of potency as a performance enhancer. If we are going to be paternalists, let’s be effective paternalists.

Added 5Mar: See also here, HT Tyler.

While U.S. life expectancy is 77.6 years … the average for NFL players is 55, 52 for linemen.

(HT Nancy Lebovitz.) Apparently:

The average NFL player plays just 3.52 seasons and loses two to three years off his life expectancy for every season played.

If true, this is an amazingly huge health harm, especially considering how much we regulate health harms in most areas.  It is far beyond the risk we’ll allow people to take on most jobs, even soldiers or astronauts.  And it is far beyond the risk we’d let customers accept in a consumer product.

Surely we can see football hurts players – we often see them carried off in on stretchers.  But I wonder: would we accept this harm nearly as much if we saw it all up close?  Players would suffer the same average loss if each season one out of ten players just dropped dead on the playing field!  (A dead 25 year old player loses 55-25 = 30 years, which is ten times the three years life lost per player per season.)

Would we really accept such carnage before our eyes?  And why do we regulate other health harms so strictly, yet so eagerly watch this decimation?

A crackdown on excessive touchdown celebrations … has moved from the National Football League to college football and now to high school football games across the country.  In the Washington area this fall, a wide receiver from 13th-ranked McNamara was flagged for pointing to the sky after a touchdown, and a Gwynn Park defender was penalized for pointing up at the sky after intercepting a pass. … “What’s happening is in the old days, there was a certain level of celebration that was allowed. Now it’s basically no celebration,” …

There are some who view the crackdown as necessary — ridding the high school game of the scripted Sharpie-in-the-sock, cellphone-in-the-goalpost-padding type of touchdown celebrations that first appeared in the NFL a few years ago. … The cleanup of those routines earned the NFL a new nickname — the No Fun League … How far can you go before you take the joy out of the sport?…  Federation rule 9-5-1 … reads, in part: “unsportsmanlike manner … Any delayed, excessive or prolonged act by which a player attempts to focus attention upon himself.”

Basketball:

Under a new zero-tolerance policy approved by the NCAA, penalizing excessive celebrations will be a point of emphasis this season. The regulation has left coaches … concerned that one of their sport’s most marketable aspects — its raw emotion — is being legislated out of the game. …

According to ACC officiating supervisor John Clougherty … the crackdown on excessive celebrations is meant to deter players from showing up or embarrassing a member of the opposing team.  Among the actions Clougherty said will be closely monitored are pointing, gesturing …

“It’s definitely going to be tough for all the players, especially when somebody gets dunked on,” said Maryland guard Greivis Vasquez, who’s been known to be excitable on the court from time to time. “You going to just keep your emotions in or you going to say nothing? You just going to be like this [stone-faced]? It’s going to be hard.

Organized sports exist in large part to let athletes look good by winning, and to let fans affiliate with winners.  Athletes commonly call attention to their wins via trophies, rings, team jerseys, score boards, etc.  So how can it be offensive for players to have a little fun by calling attention to their winning plays during a game?

That last quote by Vasquez gets at the key, I think: when it is hard not to brag, not bragging is more impressive than bragging.   Since we want our athletes to be impressive, we want them not to brag.  We don’t mind athletes having fun, but not fun that makes them seem less impressive.

So not only were authorities dead wrong, but they were so confidently wrong that, in the name of helping runners, they paternalistically forced runners to do the exact worst thing!  How could authorities be so wrong for so long on something that was so easy to personally test, and with such huge consequences?  And how could they remain wrong for three decades after careful study had proved them wrong?