If You're Paying For Cable, You're Paying For The Channels You Watch

Another day, another naive treatment of the economics of cable bundling. Here's the basic situation. Many people love to watch sports channels on their cable package, and especially in a world where live sports is really the thing that can't be replicated without cable this is a big deal. So cable channels charge a per subscriber high carriage fee to cable providers for the right to carry their channel. But many other people don't like to watch sports. So people think that if the channels were unbundled, non-fans could get their non-sports channels for less. But that's too quick. Say you pay $60 a month for your cable package. Lots of channels come with the package, but you really only watch MSNBC, the Food Network, SyFy, Bravo, and USA. Sure every once in a while you flip to Fox to see hilarious conservative coverage of Obama speaking, and every couple of years you watch a few Olympic...