>Formally, the quality-of-life benefit to a particular fan who attends a sports game is the amount above the admission price they would have been willing to spe

>Formally, the quality-of-life benefit to a particular fan who attends a sports game is the amount above the admission price they would have been willing to spend to attend the game. For instance, if someone is willing to spend $30 to attend a game that only costs $20, they receive a $10 quality-of-life benefit. Adding up the individual quality-of-life benefits of all residents who attend games yields the total metro area’s quality-of-life benefit from game attendance. Nope, this is real economic theory. It's not something the Fed invented out of thin air, and it's used in a wide variety of fields. Of course, there is a (widely-acknowledged) epistemic problem in assuming a person's desire for something is proportional to the happiness they will receive from it -- this is called "the theory of revealed preferences", and it is used primarily because all of the alternatives people have been able to think of so far (for assessing happiness) are even worse.