But simply having people bet on and thus forecast what the Economist GIU's "stability" indices will be in a year seems innocuous--and might actually provide some useful information..
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Hmmm.
If your goal is to develop a kind of predictive ability for events like coups, wouldn't it be simpler and therefore more elegant, as the physicists say, to simply have people on the payroll living in the countries of interest who spoke the language, read the newspapers, watched the TV shows and possesed some ground-level understanding of the overall situation?
Even reading the work of good journalists on-the-scene would fill in a number of understanding gaps.
Have we reached such a level of market-techno-fetish debauchery that something as straightforward as this is less evident than a bizarre futures market?
If yes, than we have entered the terminal phase of jackassedness.
DRM
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