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Exploiting Inefficiencies: Moneyball and Opportunities For Innovation in High School Policy Debate

Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.
— George Kneller

Michael Lewis’s 2003 bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game chronicles the innovative approach taken by the Oakland Athletics during the past two decades to field a winning baseball team with a modest payroll. In order to compete with the league’s best teams, the A’s were forced to locate and exploit opportunities to do things better than the rest of baseball. Innovation wasn’t just a luxury but a requirement: if the A’s wanted to win, they had to rethink business-as-usual.

This essay applies the lessons of Moneyball to high school policy debate. In the same way that the A’s exploited inefficiencies in baseball’s labor market to achieve competitive success, students can take advantage of inefficiencies in debate’s argument market to best their opponents. The key is innovation.

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