Here's what I turned in for my NASCAR paper. It ain't great, and I'm going to improve it a bit with the critiques of classmates and my prof to get it to a publishable level, but it's a start, and I think I'll get a decent grade on it.
NASCAR as a pedagogical metaphor
for the global economy
Andrew Shears
22 November 2005
Globalization has brought forth an economic geography that is increasingly complex. The historically dispersed economies have become intrinsically linked and extremely interdependent upon one another, creating a seemingly global economy. This global economy is an incredibly dynamic phenomenon, with vast arrays of constantly changing linkages and dependencies that occur on enormous scales that include nearly all living humans. However, these grand scales of a global economy make nearly incomprehensible to a majority of those involved.
In order to present the multifaceted nature of the global economy, a number of approaches may be deployed. In the case of presenting information in a situation of formal education, a common technique is the pedagogical metaphor. Such a metaphor increases the accessibility to an advanced concept by relating that concept to a more pedestrian idea. The purpose of this paper is to introduce such a metaphor by which a number of facets of the global economy can be related to stock car racing, specifically that racing sanctioned by NASCAR. First, NASCAR will be introduced to ensure a common basis of knowledge on the topic. Secondly, some major concepts and controversies of the global economy will be developed. Thirdly, a number of pedagogical metaphors will be introduced, each using situations found in NASCAR to explain some concept of the global economy. Finally, the metaphorical concept will be critiqued to reveal areas of weakness and inapplicability.
An Introduction to NASCAR
First sanctioning races in 1949, the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing emerged out from rather humble beginnings. During the Prohibition, illegal distillers of alcoholic “moonshine” were located remote rural areas of the southeastern United States. In order to sell the liquor in the underground urban markets, the product required transport capable of eluding federal officials. Adventurous private automobile owners called “moonshine runners” were hired to complete this task (Sampson, 2005). To improve the probability of successfully eluding authorities during transport, the moonshine runners experimented with various mechanical alterations to improve vehicle performance (Wikipedia, 2005). Successful moonshine runners gained local recognition as skilled drivers and mechanics. Curiosity and competition eventually led to the regular staging of informal races on Sunday afternoons between moonshine runners to compare driving skills and the performance-based mechanical adaptations. After the end of the Prohibition, the racing of these mechanically modified racecars continued for purposes of sport and competition (Sampson, 2005). With the competitions drawing crowds of spectators, entrepreneurs built enclosed racetracks to host the races and charge admission to the spectators, promising participating racers an award based on performance. However, many of the racetrack owners quickly earned reputations for dishonesty, cheating drivers from the established monetary awards. To protect the interests of the drivers and to ensure the growth of the sport, Bill France, Sr., a racecar owner and driver created NASCAR in 1947 (Sampson 2005; Wikipedia, 2005). The creation of such a sanctioning body gave racers protection from dishonest track owners, enforcing standards of quality and safety necessary to host a race event. In 1949, NASCAR organized eight race events at various tracks into a larger competitive “season,” guaranteeing that each track would have the same drivers and establishing a method to measure long-term driver performance. Performances by drivers in NASCAR events were awarded points based on finishing positions; the driver with the most points at the end of the season was crowned as the year’s champion (Wikipedia, 2005).
NASCAR continued to expand through the next several decades, sanctioning an annual average of 40 races by the mid-1950s, with as many as 75 racecars participating in each race. Many of the NASCAR races were held on dirt racetracks until the 1960s, when the body’s preference for paved racetracks was formalized, reducing the number of races to approximately 25 annually (Sampson, 2005). In 1972, the title of the series championship was named the Winston Cup, beginning a three decade partnership with R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Beginning in the early 1980s, NASCAR experienced unprecedented growth in revenues and market. In 1982, a secondary NASCAR race series sponsored by the Anheuser Busch Corporation, the Busch Series, was started as a league for younger drivers to gain experience with hopes of eventually joining Winston Cup team. A third NASCAR race series sponsored by Craftsman Tools, the Craftsman Truck Series was started in 1995 for the same purpose (ibid). The Winston Cup series also expanded as new markets were opened; the series sanctioned 36 races beginning in the 2002 season. Beginning in the 2004 season, sponsorship of NASCAR’s main series was changed from Winston to Nextel Communications, renaming the season championship the Nextel Cup (Montgomery, 2003). This shift was viewed by many as an attempt to attract a wider base of fans to the sport (GlaxoSmithKline, 2005).
The Nextel Cup Series currently consists of 36 races held between March and November of each year constituting a season. In this system, each race remains an individual event that crowns the driver to complete the prescribed distance first as the winner of the event. A number of points are awarded to each driver based on performances in each individual event, the points accumulating through the season. Through the 2003 season, the driver with the most points at the end of the season was crowned the Cup champion. Beginning in 2004, the final ten races of the season were separated from the rest of the season, denoted as “The Chase for the Cup.” This change was instituted because of the many prior seasons in which the points champion had been mathematically determined weeks before the final race. In this new “Chase,” the drivers ranking in the top ten of points earned were awarded a new adjusted score based on their ranking to ensure more competition, while all other drivers were eliminated from the season championship. Those drivers participating in the Chase were awarded points based on performance in the final ten races of the season, with the driver having the highest total crowned the season’s Nextel Cup champion (NASCAR, 2004).
In the early years of NASCAR, race teams consisted of one person: the driver, who was also the mechanic and owner of the car. The adoption of technological innovations transformed the “stock” cars common early in NASCAR’s existence into purpose-built racecars costing millions of dollars annually to build and maintain. The monetary and skill requirements of these highly specialized machines caused an expansion of the race team from one person to a crew of more than 100 people. Race teams now consist of many members with specific purposes, including the team sponsor, owner, crew chief, car chief, driver, as well as dozens of mechanics and designers (Dummies.com, 2005).
Why NASCAR?
The purpose of a pedagogical metaphor is to utilize a widely accessible model to induce understanding of more complex concept. Using NASCAR for such a relationship provides a base that is accessible to a wide population. In the past decade, the popularity of NASCAR has grown considerably. Most sources record NASCAR’s fan base to be approximately 75 million people in the United States, including one out of three adults. After top-ranked football, NASCAR is the second ranked sport in terms of television viewership in the United States. In terms of gender, a “surprising 40%” of fans were recorded as females (Henry Licensing Group, 2005). In regional geographical dispersion of NASCAR fans mirrors that of the total population in the United States (Finney, 2004). NASCAR’s popularity is particularly growing among children and minorities. Between 1999 and 2004, ESPN found that the number of NASCAR fans in the 12-17 year age group had increased by 12%, compared to 1.2% for the second-fastest growing sport in the demographic, football (Zimmer, 2004). Finney (2004) reported that between 1999 and 2002, NASCAR’s numbers of Hispanic and African-American fans had grown substantially. The Hispanic NASCAR fan base grew by 134% over this time, while the African-American fan base grew by 86%. With such a wide following that is experiencing tremendous growth, NASCAR is well-suited to provide a pedagogical metaphor to which increasingly many in the American public can relate.
An Incredibly Brief Introduction to Today’s Global Economy
Globalization is a controversial topic today among world politicians and economists. The global economy is a complex system in which all humans are involved, yet it is one of which very few of those involved have a workable understanding. A generalized examination of the global economy today would note the United States in a position of unparalleled power, followed in rank by the developed nations of the European Union and Japan. The imbalanced relationships of power created by capitalist competition and the large scales to which these relationships are applied in the global economy are objectionable to critics. Many scholars argue that the politics of the global economy are established in a way that will indefinitely continue this hierarchy of power, a reason for further condemnation of globalization-friendly legislation.
Through human history, as spatially dispersed and isolated people interlinked with innovations of improved transportation and communication, their economic activities also interconnected. In the past hundred years, the linkages between various economies of the world have increased exponentially because of a political culture that has encouraged trade liberalization in addition to technological innovations in trade. The process by which the dispersed economies of the world have grown into one large global network of interconnected and interdependent economic systems is known as globalization. The interlinked global economy follows a markedly capitalist organization of power, with many economies competing for profit.
The beginnings of globalization reach back into history to the era of European colonialism. Beginning especially in the fifteenth century, European nation-states began to build territorial empires by claiming (and by enforcing the claims through military action) the lands of other continents. With the development of these territorial empires, the Europeans exploited from these lands a vast wealth of natural resources. As the colonies were further developed into agricultural purposes, many times with African slave labor, the colonies provided their ‘mother countries’ with raw materials to process and markets to buy the processed goods. It is not a reach to claim that Europe industrialized on the exploitation of the colonies. While many colonies in the western hemisphere achieved some measure of political independence from the European empires during the 18th and 19th centuries, colonialism continued through much of Africa and Asia until after World War II. Smith (2005) argued that the developed world was dependent upon the exploitation of these colonies, and that the developed states maintained a nearly-colonial advantage over these states through neo-liberal means even after formal independence.
Developed in 1944 during World War II as a system to rebuild the international economy through an established postwar economic plan, the Bretton Woods Agreements were developed by the Allies to control the monetary exchange relationships between states (Wikipedia, 2005a). While all 44 of the Allied nations sent delegates to the meetings in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, as the preeminent world economic powers of the time, the United States and the United Kingdom essentially controlled the meetings (Smith, 2005). The Bretton Woods meetings created the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a precursor to the World Bank (WB), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, which is now known as the World Trade Organization (WTO). To ensure stability in currency exchange, a policy created during the meeting called for the use of a gold standard on all currencies (ibid).
Created to regulate the exchange rates of currency and to provide loans to states for exchange shortfalls, control of the IMF was granted to states proportionally to the funding these states provided. Such an arrangement gave the United States Treasury, controllers of 30% of the fund, effective control the organization. In 1971 the United States ended the international gold standard by unilaterally eliminating the standard domestically. With this change, the IMF gained before untapped disciplinary power over nations with balance-of-payment deficits (Smith, 2005). The organization gained additional power in global economic politics when the WB, European Union and others required IMF approval before funds could be granted or loaned (Stiglitz, 2002). In order to obtain funding approval from the IMF, underdeveloped states were forced to conform to “free trade” guidelines that were favorable to developed nations. According to Smith (2005), the United States used its control of the IMF to aid developed nations in maintaining domination of the global economy. Harvey (2001) argued a similar concept, claiming that the developed world engaged in a systematic elimination of the comparative advantages of a structural coherence that the undeveloped might possess to ensure a market to relieve overproduction in the developed world. However, to Stiglitz, a former World Bank executive, the IMF was a missionary project begun with the best intentions that had grown into a difficult position of power due to cultural naïveté.
That the United States attempted to achieve global economic domination through neo-liberal means is not an idea unique to Smith. Harvey (2001) claimed that those states involved in capitalism participated in such neo-liberal practices by a necessity of the system. Capitalism, when successful in cycles of wealth generation and investment in increased efficiency of production, results in a state of overproduction of goods. This overproduction meant that added value could not be realized for these goods, the capital invested into the production would be lost, and the necessary cycle of wealth generation would not be continued, resulting in an economic crisis. Harvey argued that neo-liberal economic politics averted such crises partially through the opening of new markets with free trade agreements.
Simple liberalization of trade policies was not the only way that the global market was manipulated by the United States to create a favorable situation for its economic domination. Brenner (2003) noted that following the U.S.-determined end of the Bretton Woods period when currency exchange rates were mostly stable, the United States realized further control over the global economy through enacting favorable currency exchange adjustments. Through the 1970s and early 1980s, the global economy had endured several recessions that had crippled productivity in much of the developed world. Japan and Germany, however, had used export-based economies and favorable rates of currency exchange to continue external cash flowing into their economies, effectively weathering the recession unscathed. The United States, taking note of the resilience of the Japanese and German economies during the downturns, determined to create such a favorable rate of exchange for its goods. In the 1985 Plaza Accords, the United States essentially used strong-arm diplomacy to establish an agreed rate of exchange that weakened the dollar and hence cheapened American exports. This cheapening gave American exports a competitive advantage over those from Germany and Japan and, according to Brenner, reinvigorated the American manufacturing sector.
By 1995 behind a manufacturing sector strengthened by the Plaza Accords, the economy of the United States was appearing to finally experience economic expansion. However, the growth had occurred at the expense of the Japanese economy, which was teetering dangerously close to crisis. Noting the linkages between Japan and the United States, especially strong through investment in U.S. Treasury Bonds, the United States began a plan to reverse the Plaza Accords. The exchange rates were adjusted so that the dollar was strengthened relative to the yen and mark, making Japanese and German exports cheaper on the world market in an attempt to revitalize the economies. The United States agreed to this adjustment to avoid the global economic instability associated with crisis that would have a directly negative effect on the American economy, which was just beginning to expand (Brenner, 2003).
With the 2000 presidential elections in the United States, foreign economic policy shifted from a neo-liberal approach one with more neo-conservative overtones. Harvey (2003) argued that the goal of the United States to achieve global economic domination was no different, but the means deployed by the neo-conservative approach to ensure this domination were more direct. The second Bush administration’s use of military force in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq were, to Harvey, the forceful opening of new markets to relieve a domestic over-accumulation of American goods. While the neo-liberal approach to global economics had used economic sanctions to coerce states to join the global market with free trade, Harvey claimed that the neo-conservatives would force states avoiding such coercion through military force, ultimately opening their markets for exploitation by developed states.
The global economy and the players which are increasingly linked through globalization are practicing an economic capitalism on a global scale. To Marxist scholars like Harvey, Smith and Brenner, the global economy is viewed through a lens of exploitation on a variety of scales. To the Marxist, the process of globalization is continuing the de-emphasis of power to the individual, in terms of both individual humans and individual economies, to allow maximum exploitation by those successful in capitalism. Future prospects for the global economy from the Marxist perspective are admittedly grim. Harvey (2003) claimed that a continuation of neo-liberal policy “entails a continuation, if not escalation of… accumulation by dispossession.” The United States, Smith argued, may not be spared as the U.S.-led wars beginning after 2001 showed a panicked admission that neo-liberal policies alone were not maintaining the status quo. Despite these severe outlooks, not all share these views of increasingly global economies as a negative process, as many benefits have been realized from continued globalization.
To some, the increasing interconnectivity of economies brought forth by globalization presents exciting possibilities. Friedman (2005) claimed that globalization is bringing a world that when fully realized will allow every human and every economy equal opportunities for prosperity. To Friedman, the increased linkages between the world’s economy would make armed conflict so unprofitable that a truly “flattened” world would create a condition of general world peace. Friedman calls this concept the “Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention,” using an example of computer manufacturing to present the concept. Because of vast interdependencies in the spatially dispersed computer production industry, instability caused by such conflict would disrupt the supply chain; costing each of the participating economies a tremendous amount profit. Friedman argued that the risk of such profit losses would motivate interested states to diffuse any such conflict before economic disruption could occur.
While optimistic about the possibilities of continued globalization, Stiglitz (2002) offered a bleaker view than Friedman. While recognizing a number of problems in the non-governmental organizations created to expand the global economy, such as the IMF, WB and WTO, Stiglitz argued that the system can be adjusted to resolve the foci of criticism. He called for a broadening of focus from the organizations, away from the stubborn adherence to economic issues and the errant application of economic ideas to non-economic problems. Stiglitz blamed this problem on the fact that the organizations only seem to answer to the governments – the developed world – to which they are accountable, and apply only the market systems of those developed states to their analysis. A solution offered to counter this problem was to open the meetings of the organizations so that the façade of “received doctrine” perceived to exist in IMF/WTO policy would be eliminated. Stiglitz firmly believed that globalization could be “a force for good,” but that without these reforms the process “will continue to create poverty and instability,” a case remarkably similar to the prognosis offered by Harvey (2003).
Certainly the global economy, a series of relationships that are constantly changing in quality, direction and power, is a complex and controversial topic. One notion that would prove agreeable to each author discussed is that the effects of the global economy will be vitally important to the daily life of every human through the foreseeable future. To enable the understanding of this perplexing and important concept, seven notable metaphorical relationships with varying applicability have been constructed using the competition of NASCAR as a more pedestrian basis.
Introducing the Metaphors
When beginning to compare two seemingly unrelated phenomena for purposes of constructing a metaphor, the simplest plane of commonality is sought. Luckily, when examining the global economy and NASCAR, the first relationship is quite obvious. As with any metaphor, hypothetical situations can be constructed within the metaphor to understand more complex concepts. The competition in NASCAR is constructed around the concept of a race, in which drivers compete using their machines to get to a certain goal (a prescribed distance) faster than the others. The global economy can also be called a race although to a less certain end, where competitors seek to achieve a higher level of profit faster than the rest of the world. From this simplest basis, a number of parallels can be drawn.
Internally, the political dynamics of a racing team are similar to those found in states. Each has a hierarchy of executives – in NASCAR, the chief executive is the owner, who is supported by a number of specially trained “chiefs,” each charged with certain aspects of team maintenance. States are typically led by chief executives (presidents or prime ministers), who have advisors (secretaries or ministers) specializing in various roles of the state’s operation. Each is dependent upon streams of revenue to compete – NASCAR teams from consumers via a sponsor (Sampson, 2005), while states derive revenue directly from the populace via taxation. Each of these streams is dependent upon a sort of allegiance. According to the Henry Licensing Group (2005), 72% of polled NASCAR fans responded that they were more likely to buy a product if it was made by the sponsor of their favorite driver, a sort of aspatial patriotism to their team. In successful states, such allegiance is essentially spatial, created partially by territorial control.
Each racing team employs a number of mechanics and specialists charged with ensuring the daily operation of the state and the maintenance of its competitive advantage against the field (Dummies.com, 2005). In states, much of the government is involved in trying to maintain a structured coherence (a la Harvey, 2001) over other states in order to gain an economic advantage over competitors. Racing teams attempt to realize the benefits of these competitive advantages by finishing races faster than the competitors, while states attempt to use structured coherences to profit more than other states. In their respective races, both a racing team and a state are governed by a larger sanctioning body – NASCAR teams are governed by the rules of competition prescribed by NASCAR including certain mechanical specifications to ensure fair competition, a disobedience of which would result in disciplinary measures. States are governed by the IMF/WTO, required to follow the prescribed free trade policies with threat of disciplinary measures.
Once the metaphorical relationships between race teams and states have firmly been established, a number of other relationships fall into place. During races, a driver that is not performing well will take a short time out of the race for mechanics to make minor adjustments to improve performance. With the high speed of the competitors, any time during which a car is stopped is costing the driver valuable standing in the race. For the race team to take this action, it must determine that the possible benefits of the adjustments outweigh both the time invested to make the adjustments and any risk that such a time investment will fail entirely. This concept is not unlike various infrastructural investments made by a hypothetical state in an attempt to improve its structured coherence. The investments made by the state may prove extremely costly, but the state may determine that the possible return on the investments will outweigh the money spent and the risk that the investments will realize no return. In both situations, the risk of the adjustments has short term and long term ramifications; to the race team, a failed adjustment may mean a poor finish in the race, but also a loss of points for the season. For a state, such investments may cause short term budgetary hardship, but may also prohibit the state from taking future actions that would be beneficial in global competition.
In the NASCAR season, 36 individual races together form another race of longer temporal scale, the Nextel Cup Championship. Victory in any of these single races, while helpful for a driver’s standing in the season championship, does not ultimately lead to a victorious season, nor does a driver have to win any races to win the season championship if the team places strongly on a consistent basis. In this way, the individual races are like innovations of efficiency for the states. Competing states race each other to create the most efficient process for wealth creation, racing for each individual innovation through risks and investments. The realization of an innovation of efficiency alone does not guarantee success, but consistent innovations realized in a timely manner does aid the state significantly in the overall race for dominance between global economies.
Another relationship that can be established between NASCAR and the global economy includes the similarities the political disciplinary systems that each utilize. In October of 2004, star racecar driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr was penalized by a deduction of 25 points in the Nextel Cup standings for violating NASCAR’s obscenity policy by saying the word “shit” during a live televised interview (Johns, 2004). In this case, Earnhardt was penalized in terms of competitive advantage for a violation of rules that did not pertain to the competition, but to the perceived benefit of the sanctioning compnay. This ‘apples-for-oranges’ disciplinary relationship is paralleled in the global economy, where so-called “rogue states” are disciplined with economic sanctions for actions deemed politically or morally unacceptable. One such example of this concept as applied to the global economy presents the international economic sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s, maintained explicitly as discipline for the misdeeds of Saddam Hussein. In NASCAR, an extreme penalty for a violation of rules is the suspension a driver for a race, disallowing that driver from earning points toward the seasonal championship standings. In August of 2003, driver Jimmy Spencer was suspended for one race by NASCAR for punching driver Kurt Busch following a race, a penalty that cost Spencer the opportunity to earn more than 185 points. In the global economy, a parallel can be found in the continuing embargo enforced on Cuba by the United States as discipline for maintaining a communist society. In both NASCAR and the global economy, a given infraction will not draw a common disciplinary act for every participant. In 2004, Tony Stewart, a popular and successful driver, was penalized by only 25 points for punching driver Brian Vickers. In this case, critics argued that severity of penalties depended not on severity of the crime, but rather on the lacking marketability of the driver involved. In the global economy, despite its continuing embargo of communist Cuba citing human rights issues, the United States continues to strengthen economic ties to China, a communist nation with a number of human rights problems. It could be argued that the differences in the relationships are a result of the difference in possible economic benefits as perceived by the United States.
If such parallels can be drawn between the capitalist nature of the global economy, constantly striving for profit through competitive advantage and NASCAR’s competition for season-long championships through individual races, the newly established “Chase for the Cup” presents a metaphorical dream for Marxists. For the final ten races of a NASCAR season, all drivers lower than the top ten in the points standings are eliminated from the championship. For the remainder of the season despite elimination, all drivers are still required to participate in each race and to assume the associated risks of financial costs and physical injury. Critics of the “Chase” point to a possibly more aggressive nature of those still eligible as a danger to the others that are forced to compete. To a Marxist, the metaphor is clear. Using competitive advantages established in a set of rules created for “fair play” by a sanctioning body, states that race ahead in the global economy require the laggards to continue in the system through various disciplinary means, effectively using them to continue the competition without regard to their safety or costs. In this case, the ‘haves’ are using the ‘have-nots’ to achieve individual goals within the sanctioning of the international non-governmental organizations, arguably in a reckless manner.
One advantage to a pedagogical metaphor is flexibility to explain other, perhaps more perplexing concepts through the use of establishing hypothetical situations in the familiar subject. Such flexibility is necessary when using NASCAR to explain the differences between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism approaches to the global economy. To delve into this application, one must assume that the NASCAR sanctioning body’s power has grown limited in the ability to govern. To explain the neo-liberal approaches to economic domination through manipulation of the systems, one could establish a hypothetical racing team which, with undue control over the NASCAR sanctioning body, can change the rules once a competitive advantage is established to prohibit the other teams from realizing such an advantage. In terms of neo-conservatism, the metaphor must be stretched even further. To explain the concept in NASCAR terms, the hypothetical neo-conservative racing team would be one that takes an active and visible role in destroying the competitive advantages of other teams, often through violent means such as intentional wrecks, mechanical sabotage, and destruction of resources. A racing team with such an ideology, once dominance was established, would have no qualms about using its dominance to chase away opposing teams’ sponsors through threats of violence or long-term economic discipline.
Limitations and Critiques of Metaphors
As with any metaphor, the ability to explain the global economy using only NASCAR is limited. While the accessibility of these metaphors is wide because of the wide market penetration of NASCAR as a sport, it is not universal. While generally one-third of all adults in the United States claim to be fans of NASCAR (Finney, 2004), two-thirds of the adult population gains nothing from the use of this metaphor. What use is a metaphor if understanding the basis requires as much learning as the concept it is deployed to explain? Certainly the uses of a metaphor are applicable only to audiences knowledgeable of the basis, an area in which NASCAR currently lacks despite tremendous continuing growth of the sport.
Perhaps the most obvious contextual limitation to the metaphor is the nature of NASCAR competitions to have a point of finality, something with no true equivalent within the global economy. Each race and each season has a specific goal to which racers are aiming to reach, with a champion crowned for each scale of competition. In the global economy, there is no point at which the dominant state is formally recognized as such, effectively ending the competition; instead, the competition continues indefinitely, with the dominant using a number of means to maintain their position.
Some basic structures of the global economy simply do not exist in NASCAR. No body in NASCAR provides a function of lending that is provided by the World Bank, and no single race team controls the sanctioning of NASCAR like the United States controls the IMF/WTO and WB (Smith, 2005). An inapplicable flow of revenue exists between racing fans and NASCAR, in which racing fans purchase tickets to race events. These race events are sponsored by individual race tracks, which earn money from concessions and a share of ticket revenue. The remainder of ticket revenue directly funds the sanctioning body of the competition. No parallels to these characteristics exist in the global economy, as there is no places where specific race events occur, nor are there any humans who can be considered non-participating spectators to the global economy.
One metaphor presented described driver performance in individual NASCAR races affecting place in the season’s standings as a parallel to innovations of efficiency that occur within states and the ability to realize such innovations in a timely fashion contributing to its competitive advantages in the global economy. The scoring system of NASCAR provides a major weakness to this relationship. Each NASCAR race is scored with the same number of points, with only an ordinal ranking measuring the performance within the race. No such quantitative measure governs the competitive advantages realized by innovations of efficiency in the global economy. Each innovation has a different importance, and each state has a different ability to realize profit on such an innovation.
In NASCAR, like many sports, the personnel rosters of race teams are dynamic, as they are assembled by the owner through the negotiations of contracts. When these contracts expire, members of race teams are free to seek a better individual situation with another team. If these race teams can be seen as similes for states, no parallel exists between the two bodies. Generally, the administration of a state is not likely to seek employment from another state, as the national and territorial loyalties to the state are obviously greater than team members to a racing team.
In order to explain more complicated concepts like neo-liberalism or neo-conservatism using NASCAR, the metaphor must be stretched using hypothetical situations. No true parallel can be drawn between the current situation of NASCAR and the geopolitical approaches of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism, as no dominant teams have been revealed as users of such philosophies outlined to achieve dominance in the sport. The use of such hypothetical situations complicates any metaphor, arguably to a point which the metaphor simplifies the real-world phenomenon very little, rendering it essentially useless.
Concluding Remarks
While the metaphorical use of NASCAR to explain various attributes of the global economy certainly has weaknesses, many positive applications of this tool have been presented. The use of this metaphor in an educational setting demands recognition of the inherent weaknesses so that unintentional fallacies are not created. The metaphor could, with some creativity, be legitimately expanded to explain more of the intricate relationships existent. The global economy is an increasingly complex and byzantine concept for those unfamiliar to understand. Certainly a more pedestrian basis of explanation certainly aids in educational explanation of this complex concept in which every human is involved. Explaining the global economy by using NASCAR as a base will prove a valuable tool to instructors of economic geography at many levels.
Works Cited
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