http://slate.msn.com/id/2086427/ Great James Surowiecki piece on the Policy Analysis Market that specifically deals with the moral objections: “Let’s admit there’s something ghoulish about betting on an assassination attempt. But let’s also admit that U.S. government analysts ask themselves every day the exact same questions that PAM traders would have been asking … If it isn’t immoral for the U.S. government to be asking these questions, it’s hard to see how it’s immoral for people outside the U.S. government to ask them.”
I don’t quite like the argument that “[allowing] terrorists to bet on themselves, thereby letting them profit from their own misdeeds, [is] a pure red herring.” The problem is not with, for example, a 10 September 2001 bet that two planes would hit the WTC at about 10 o’clock the next day (insider-trading?!), but bets made by terrorists to compensate for the intrinsic “volatility” of their business. There is some small chance that Al Qaeda’s training bases will be, say, decimated by air strikes—so why not manage this risk by betting that this will in fact happen? If it doesn’t, you have your training base; if it does, you have the money to build a new one. 11:31
