Wrong. I'll clarify: Prioritizing Toronto over other jurisdictions means accepting injection funding from the province and the feds, even if it means some of the earmarked spending is arguably 'wasteful' vis a vis where it may or may not have been spent outside the jurisdiction... and no, i'm not going to reject infrastructure/revitalization funding just because it comes along with a new stadium or a second velodrome!
You're dodging the entire criticism of the Olympics, which is that the benefits AREN'T worth the waste. They may be to you, and whoop-de-do, but the entire critique of the Olympics is that they're not.
So, no, it's not a matter of you 'prioritizing' Toronto and critics not 'prioritizing' Toronto. There's a departure of opinion over how to prioritize Toronto.
Frankly this would be easier if you could at least drop lazy rhetorical strategies like positioning your personal opinions as a the objective "prioritization" of Toronto. We're all trying to prioritize Toronto, ok?
No, this is just lazy. There is absolutely zero consensus... and you simply cannot make blanket statements, the scenarios being so different from one host city to another. Even the blurb you quote below is flawed (my comments in blue):
Again, the actual academics who surveyed the actual academic literature concluded that the "majority of the profession" think the Games' costs outweigh their benefits. That's a consensus. So at this point it's you, who says there is no consensus, versus the academics who say there is. You could have cited dissident academic voices but you didn't.
Moreover, you seem to have an issue with probabilistic conclusions. The academic consensus that the Olympic Games are "unlikely" to deliver more benefits than costs isn't at all weakened, as you seem to think it is, by an observation that one host city may have eked more benefits than it cost. The argument that most people don't win the lottery isn't weakened by the premise that Jane did.
1. As has already been argued it is such a massive error in thinking to assume (or take as fact in this case) that a city like Toronto would retain the infrastructure/revitalization funding promised for hosting a games if it didn't host the games. There are many many political reasons why this isn't so. In fact this assumption is strictly within the realm of fantasy. Part of the allure of hosting is the prospect of committed government funding with firm timelines, which in reality is a very rare scenario.
Look at the list Salsa posted right after your comment. Toronto got most of what was tied to our 2008 bid, so it's hardly a "fantasy" as you say. Out of 10 projects, 6 were completed regardless. Of the remaining 4 projects, only 2 are really missing. The temporary Cherry Station definitionally wouldn't have been long term infrastructure, and the Front Street West extension was cancelled because City Council decided it wasn't appropriate. So, ya know, maybe you want to revise just how much that assumption is "strictly within the realm of fantasy."
2. This is also an assumption. Locals who stay and spend in the city during an olympics short term (and thereafter long term) might well have opted to travel outside of the city/region instead, as they often do. It is never a given that entertainment and vacation spending by locals will remain in the area. In fact retaining locals can represent a massive boon to the local economy and tourism industry.
The existence of a substation effect is assumed, but fairly easy to support from basic logic. For your criticism to be valid that there is no substitution effect, due the Olympics "retaining" locals, you'd have to assume that all locals who attend the games are substituting the Olympics for goods & services that would have been consumed elsewhere. That just seems highly unlikely.
The exact magnitude of the substitution effect is obviously unclear and difficult to quantify. You're right in that locals may be substituting the Olympics for goods/services outside the region.
Nonetheless, the reason economists point out the substitution effect (+crowding out effect) is because benefits are usually stated incrementally (e.g. "during the Games, locals spent 20% more"), which is misleading since a part of that gross increase is likely to substituted from something else.
3. Again, this is just too broad to be taken seriously. Yes, white elephants get built (no question) but so do long-stalled, badly-needed infrastructure/revitalization projects. As with many issues surrounding an olympics the experience varies enormously from host city to host city, according to how the games are organized and what the city's specific objectives are.
Again, I don't understand why you seem to think specific examples disprove a general conclusion. It could be true that some cities do get useful bits of infrastructure (e.g. the Canada Line) while also being true that the mega-events as a whole are dragged down by useless projects.
4. You cannot unilaterally decide to overlook something because it's intangible. These intangibles are a big part of hosting, they are often a big part of what cities want to achieve.
The paper in question didn't do that. The passage in question simply stated that "however, the very existence of this intangible spillover is uncertain, let alone it's magnitude." The issue isn't that intangibles should be overlooked, the issue is that it's not clear at all these events produce the intangibles they're intended to.
... and you should, but you are doing yourself a disservice in cherry picking strictly negative points of view. There is a wealth of info' out there and in my experience it is all over the map. Read for some balance. The experience with some cities/games has been bad, no question, but many cities have achieved what they set out to achieve in hosting.
I spent the time to actually source and justify my opinions with academic research. If you have contradictory research you're more than welcome to post it here, but you haven't.
This question is much, much more settled than you are presenting.
Again, simply showing that stuff happened during/after an event and imputing causality is extremely unsound reasoning.
It's literally the BearTax Argument. Then again, Olympic boosters could also just as easily be summed up by Marge vs. the Monorail, a timeless parable of wooly dreams of municipal grandeur overwhelming reasoning. I could just imagine the IOC standing up and signing that "I've sold Olympics to London, Beijing and Athens and by golly put them on the map."
The city has to be able to keep the city moving while the olympics are here. This doesn't just mean moving tourists, athletes and media but the entire city has to function while this is happening. Toronto is already gridlocked without the games. This will have to mean some key infrastructure improvements, improvements that are already long-stalled and past-due in the first place.
The City has to move orders of magnitude more people each and every weekday than anything caused by the Olympics. Look at our 2008 bid. It wasn't imagining some kind of massive revamp of regional infrastructure; we were talking about a lightly used LRT along QQE, a
temporary station at Cherry, some road works in the Olympic zones and Union Renovations. Not nothing but we're really not talking about "key infrastructure improvements," save Union (which happened, because it was "key" and our politicians aren't as useless as you think).
