An economist writes: “the fulminations over the #1 pick seem overheated to me.”

Jonathan Falk writes: I [Falk] am always amazed at the amount of (digital) ink spilled on the perverse incentives involved in taking to get the #1 draft pick. The current local woes of the Giants and Jets obviously contribute a lot to these discussions, but they happen all the time. As an economist, it’s clear to me that the value of a draft pick is the incremental value, not the absolute value. I’m completely aware that the upper tails of distributions have much more dispersion than the center, or even the 80th-90th percentile does, but the fulminations over the #1 pick still seem overheated to me. First, of course, is the fact that assessment is made with error, and there are plenty of #1 busts in every sport. #2s can be busts as well, of course, but that merely lowers the expected difference between #1 and #2 as the true value of both is attenuated towards 0 — #1 loses more. Second, there is the issue of team fit. Greatness is a vector, not a number, and if the teams ahead of you…