Read about this Terrorism Futures Market. Thought it was a bad dream. Real Tin-Foil Hat stuff. If the "house" is losing, just look the other way and allow an eensy little attack...collect a few bucks for the Treasury, get more anti-terrorism funding from the Jackpot Jackasses in congress and move on. No, it's for real, pays your money takes your chances...with our national security.
The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.
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The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts — essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.
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(Sen Byron) Dorgan described it as useless, offensive and "unbelievably stupid."
"Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in ... and bet on the assassination of an American political figure, or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?" he said.
Does anyone remember those two futures trade on American and United Airlines before 9/11? Gee, how similar.
Actually, this type of thing has proven to be successful in other areas. I think it's at least worth a shot--if it turns out to be a good predictor of future results, why knock how it comes about?
Pretty far out, but this is something the Chicago Econ boys would come up with. It's to 'game' the possibilities in order to better predict them. Similar studies can be found at the current release pile or working papers over at NBER.org. It's strange for certain, not quite as strange as the ESP stuff and 'projection' nonsense they were into some 20 years ago though. It's a way of generating data to test theories. Pretty circular argument unless you also consider that someone with 'real info' might also want to play, so it might be a double sided game here too. 'Say Amad, congrats. you won this weeks pot. Now someone will be at your door shortly to ask you how you knew this was going down...'
Does this mean that bettors may be rooting for bad things to happen so that they can win the game? Was this game devised by Bill Bennett? Would participating constitute gambling?
posted by: Shag from Brookline on 07.29.03 at 07:56 AM [permalink]
