One blog used that first sentence as the basis of a headline. In terms of economist trash talk, this was basically the authors flexing.
But their summary of the 78 percent statistic was incomplete. Here is what my SI story said: “Reports from a host of sources (athletes, players’ associations, agents and financial advisers) indicate that: By the time they have been retired for two years, 78 percent of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.”
I called up the California Institute of Technology’s Kyle Carlson, one of the authors of the working paper, and mentioned this discrepancy. I pointed out that excluding the details about joblessness and divorce helped mask the difficulty of measuring a personal, complex issue. Financial health cannot be comprehensively captured by whether a person filed for bankruptcy or not. That their results are “quite different” from, well, an entirely different study should be surprising to approximately zero people.
Bankruptcy, by definition, is an elective legal proceeding wherein a person publicly admits an inability to pay outstanding debts. It is also a sufficient but absolutely not necessary condition for defining financial stress; for various reasons, bankruptcy and financial stress can even be mutually exclusive. In my reporting, I have met athlete after athlete who knew to avoid the headline-generating shame of a bankruptcy filing. Even if their finances remained a shambles. Even if they were, by any reasonable standard, broke.