Over the last several years political futures markets have been developed where people can bet on the outcome of future elections. The idea behind these markets is that people who place their money on the outcomes of elections will more accurately predict those outcomes than polls conducted before the election. It is a concept that is based on the "wisdom of crowds." The concept of the "wisdom of crowds" is that thousands or even millions of people can collectively obtain more information and therefore more accurately predict what will happen than even the most brillant single individual.
If you look at the two political futures markets where participants are allowed to use real money, Intrade and the Iowa Electronics Markets, you will see that in both markets Democrats are favored to win the presidential election in 2008.
Conservatives love to praise free markets. They profess to believe that such markets are the best way to evaluate products, ideas, and everything else. It is ironic that the political future markets are, as of September 21, 2007, predicting that the White House will be captured by Democrats in 2008.
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