Could Pat Buchanan’s socio-economic ramblings lead to the creation of socially interesting, long-term prediction markets?
Economist Michael Giberson: It would be a real public service to run well-conceived prediction markets based on the grandiose political pronouncements of the ‘chattering classes.’ Get the book author to cooperate in specifying a handful of significant, meaningful, testable claims that are discussed in the book. Get the publisher to subsidize the market maker (on the theory that the resulting publicity will sell more books). Let the author put his money where his mouth is. Assume Buchanan expects to make in excess of $100,000 in royalties from his book. Can he find 10 well-defined claims that he is willing to bet, say, $2,000 on? Even if his book is complete nonsense and he turns out wrong on every single one of his 10 claims, he’d still have over $80,000 in income from his nonsensical ramblings about “loss of sovereignty” and manufacturing jobs “vanishing”. If I understand well, Mike Giberson is talking here about subsidized prediction markets. One could go further with decision-aid ma
