[lbo-talk] Varian defends terror futures

[Brad DeLong]

>Brad DeLong wrote:
>
>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..
>
>****************
>
>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

And if you talk to Robin Hanson, he'll say that lots of people in 
foreign countries who won't talk to the CIA--or who will tell the CIA 
what they think it wants to hear--*might* (or might not) be willing 
to bet $50 that the PAM's estimate of the lifespan of the Egyptian 
government is way too high...

Brad DeLong