Wow! I learned something new this week.
Until yesterday, I had no idea that people could actually bet on politics. Sometimes it’s called “prediction.” After reading America for Sale: Kalshi, Corruption, and the Price of Power by Adam Kinzinger (I’ll add a link to the article at the bottom), I started digging deeper into the world of legalized political betting.
According to Wikipedia, the clearest explanation goes like this:
“Prediction markets, also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives, are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives. They are exchange-traded markets established for trading bets in the outcome of various events. The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is. A typical prediction market contract is set up to trade between 0 and 100%. The most common form of a prediction market is a binary option market, which will expire at the price of 0 or 100%. Prediction markets can be thought of as belonging to the more general concept of crowdsourcing which is specially designed to aggregate information on particular topics of interest. The main purposes of prediction markets are eliciting [and] aggregating beliefs over an unknown future outcome.” ([1] “Prediction Market” – Investopedia)
Apparently, this concept goes way back. According to Wikipedia, the earliest known political “prediction” was in 1503—betting on who would become the next pope. And in the U.S., there are election betting records on Wall Street dating as far back as 1884. (https://w.wiki/T6p)
Learning all this has been fascinating. But if this practice has been around for so long, why does it suddenly feel so troubling to me?
Simple: Donald Trump Jr. is now on the board of Kalshi.
Gosh—shouldn’t that be investigated? Conflict of interest, anyone?
Oh wait—cue the usual deflection: “What about Hunter’s laptop?”
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