Fantasy Intellectual Teams Draft for May

eleven owners, choosing five intellectuals each

On April 28, we held the draft for the next season of Fantasy Intellectual Teams. Eleven owners each chose five intellectuals to track their points during the month of May. The teams can be found here.

Earlier, I had set up a smaller 5-team league of four intellectuals each, chosen by me, a league that I called Media Stars, a league which also will operate in May. It turns out that of the 20 players I put into that league, 18 were chosen by the May Owners’ League drafters. The 2 not chosen were Jason Riley or Matt Ridley, who I had put on the Dead Trees Walking team of newspaper columnists.

Players who performed better than expected in April and who were consequently prize picks for May included Emily Oster, Zvi Mowshowitz, and Alex Tabarrok. Relative to the April draft, fewer tech people were included. For May, I count only Ben Thompson, Mike Solana, and Balaji Srinivasan. Also relative to April, there were many fewer chosen who work in the D.C. world of politics or think tanks. For May, Yuval Levin seems to be the only one.

Several of the players picked were from the GMU economics department: Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan. The most left-of-center players chosen were probably Cass Sunstein, Yascha Mounk, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Eric Weinstein, Bret Weinstein-Heather Heying (counted as as one player), and Matt Taibbi. My guess is that there are intellectuals on the left that the owners overlooked.

Winning teams will be chosen on the basis of an objective scoring system. Which team do you think will win? Do you think that you could find five intellectuals who were not chosen that you think would be a championship team?