Recently I caught a tech program hosted by John Stossel that talked about betting on predictions, which he claimed yielded the wisdom of the crowd in predicting winners. At one time the government looked into crowd-prediction betting to help foresee events of war, terrorism, etc., but the kibosh was put on it by outraged senators.
While looking for Stossel's tech program, I came across the predictions he touted the afternoon of the Iowa Caucuses. He jauntily said how well prediction markets do, pooh-poohed polling that was saying Hillary and Bernie were neck-in-neck, and said the prediction markets were breaking 70-30 for Hillary.
Betting markets are illegal in the US, so Stossel has created his own site, based on British crowd-prediction odds: ElectionBettingOdds.com .
2 comments:
Though polling is definitely not an exact science, I'm sure that Stossel's new machine makes use of precisely zero science. He's as committed a pseudo-libertarian ideologue as they come, and every pretension he makes to any knowledge about the world flows ineluctably from that fact.
I knew nothing about him except he'd been around a while, kind of a Sixty Minutes type journo.
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