Average NFL player salary

It is a curious fact, and one that ought to trouble us more than it does, that the amount of money America allocates to escape the planet correlates almost perfectly with the amount it pays people to run into each other on grass, and that both have been climbing in gentle tandem since 2005 as if guided by the same invisible hand, or perhaps the same invisible accountant. One might reasonably ask whether NASA and the NFL are secretly the same organization wearing different uniforms. They are not.

The explanation, I suspect, is pleasantly mundane: both budgets float on the same rising tide of American GDP. When the economy grows, more money sloshes into almost every institutional bucket simultaneously—the government gets fatter, professional sports get fatter, and both become fatter in remarkably similar ways. Consider that in 2005, the average NFL player earned about 1.4 million dollars, while NASA's budget hovered near 16 billion; by 2023, those figures had both roughly doubled, which is to say they moved together the way two swimmers caught in the same current move together, not because they're coordinating but because the current is doing the moving. Add inflation, add the fact that both organizations compete for attention and funding in an economy that was, on net, getting wealthier (with exceptions noted), and the correlation stops being mysterious and becomes almost inevitable.

What's remarkable here is not that we found a correlation—we could find correlations between virtually any two expensive American institutions if we squinted hard enough—but that we found such a robust one, which tells us something about the shape of American prosperity during these years: broad, undiscriminating, lifting all boats including the athletic and the astronomical. The data offers no moral, only a fact: what goes up together comes up together. You could build a spaceship or watch people play football. Apparently we did both.