Prediction Markets

July 16, 2015|Accelerating Democracy, Decentralization, Empiricism, Obamacare, Prediction Markets

Creating a More Decentralized and Market Driven Democracy

Princeton University Press had just published a new paperback edition of my book, Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology. It argues for using the tools given by our new computational technology to help democracy adapt to our accelerating rate of social change.

The basic insight of the book should be congenial to friends of the classical liberal tradition in political thought. It is to deploy decentralized mechanisms that modern technology makes possible to improve self-government. For instance, the internet greatly facilitates betting pools, called information or prediction markets, which permit people to bet on the occurrence of future events. Such markets already gauge election results more accurately than polls. If legalized and modestly subsidized, they could also foretell many policy results better than politicians or experts alone. We could then better predict the consequences of changes in educational policy on educational outcomes or a stimulus program on economic growth. In short, such markets would provide a visible hand to help guide policy results. Unfortunately, while such markets are a public good, our government now impedes them at every turn.

The internet today also encourages dispersed media like blogs to intensify confrontations about contending policy claims.

February 28, 2014|Greg Abbott, Identity Politics, Ilya Somin, Prediction Markets, Texas, Wendy Davis

The Problem of Identity Politics

by John O. McGinnis|

The race for Texas governor offers a chance for substantial debate on policy. The leading Republican, Greg Abbott, is for limited government on economic matters, supports greater restrictions on abortion and is more conservative on social issues. The leading Democrat, Wendy Davis, is for somewhat more expansive government than Texas now has, favors abortion rights, and is less conservative on social issues.

But campaign coverage has instead focused on the biography of Davis and the comments of a singer supporting Abbot. Davis is being attacked for discrepancies in the biography she put forward and for her behavior in a marriage that ended in divorce. Abbot is being assailed for the incendiary and reprehensible comments of Ted Nugent. These disputes do not tell us much, if anything, about how either candidate would perform as governor, or the efficacy of the policies they have proposed. The candidates’ previous experience in the offices of Attorney General (Abbott) and state senator (Davis) seems far more relevant. To be sure, both candidates seem to have invited these controversies; Davis by making her biography a central part of her campaign and Abbott by welcoming Nugent’s support, not for his understanding of policy, but because of his celebrity.

The focus of the campaign, however, reveals much about modern politics. It demonstrates that much of political debate is not about what policy objective is preferable or what results a candidate’s agenda will have. It is instead about making citizens feel comfortable about themselves and indeed morally superior to others.

April 7, 2013|Accelerating Democracy, Administrative State, Campaign Finance, Friedrich Hayek, Prediction Markets, Progressivism

Achieving Democracy with Technological Change

by Bradley A. Smith|

Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology (John O. McGinnis)

John McGinnis certainly doesn’t underestimate the importance of his task in Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology. By page 4, he makes clear that “mass disorientation” caused by rapid technological change “can become the source of both national aggression and non-state terrorism… the dynamic of modern technology could as easily lead to a nightfall of civilization as to the dawn of a far better world.” With that bold statement of the stakes, McGinnis, the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern University, takes on the very Madisonian task of considering the design of a government for the twenty-first century…

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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