Pass the sherry, ol' chum!
Do you ever feel like the man has got his boot on your neck? That you are slaving away at a job you loathe in order to pay bills that you just can’t get ahead of? That it is more and more difficult to keep mouths fed? That there is just no hope? No way to move forward?
Of course not! You, ol’ chum, are a surfer!
And a new study by two Oxford economists, published in Forbes, details the value of waves and how much we pay for them. Shall we read a section ol’ chum?
Waves, it turns out, are no drop in the ocean. High-quality waves, the authors estimate, generate economic activity worth $50 billion per year globally. That’s around $20m every year for each place with good surf. And when surfers discover a great new spot, economic growth in the area can rise by up to three percentage points for the next five years. Good waves also help turn the tide of rural poverty by encouraging the poor to stream into towns to join the surfing economy.
Ol’ chum? Are you still reading or have you retired to the bridge room? Cribbage? Are you drinking the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti or the Domaine Leflaive Montrachet? The Chateau Lafite?
Good choice, ol’ chum!
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In my younger and more vulnerable years, I surfed crummy waves.
Tell that to the 711 clerk who was trying to get me to stop drinking the old english when his back was turned and got even more pissed when i took a bag of dorritos and squirted “free cheese” in to it instead of buying the actual nachos…
If your gonna channel F. Scott Chas, don’t fuck around with Old Sport!
Chateauneuf du Pape or nuthin’
It certainly pays for a lot of education for the locals.
yeah, this is the pitch to every tourism department on earth, bet Robb Report has some good statistics from SUPing CEOs for us too.
Everything as commodity. I used to have friends til I saw the value in them.
My city government does not value such statistics nor do we have a High-quality wave. I guess my surf community will have to be at an impasse on this one.. It sure seems the ego’s around here believe otherwise!
The best way to predict the future,
Is to create it
Your my fortune cookie today.. Second person to share similar advice. Thanks!