Prediction Markets and the 2008 Electoral Map

Electionwatch submitted a predicted electoral map of the 2008 US Presidential election, based on the bets made by the intrade prediction markets. I'm always interested in these markets and how accurate they end up being. This one calls it for Obama, but then again you probably could guess that by just watching 10 minutes of any TV "News" channel.

Comments

I, for one, welcome our new Votemaster!

[Iambic Pentametor]

I visit http://www.electoral-vote.com/ every day.

Re:I, for one, welcome our new Votemaster!

[Falkkin]

"also a tech guy" ... yes, and an infamous one: "LINUX is obsolete [...] LINUX is a monolithic style system. This is a giant step back into the 1970s. That is like taking an existing, working C program and rewriting it in BASIC. To me, writing a monolithic system in 1991 is a truly poor idea." -Andrew S. Tanenbaum, comp.os.minix, Jan. 29 1992.

Right before the 2004 election, electoral-vote.com called the election for Kerry. Oops!

I appreciate his sentiments and his methodology but it seems he doesn't have a great track record for picking winners :)

Re:Called if for Obama

[jgarra23]

That after 8 years, Republicans can't protect America?
Not to take any of the blame from the Repubs but I think it's safe to include the Dems in there as well. Any ounce of thoughtful prevention from anyone has been quickly buried by both.

Score one for the politicians, I'm surprised that no one has realized that there really is only one party with two different subsets in America.

Re:No, You.

[Shakrai]

I addressed that in the very next sentence that you conveniently disregarded... yeeesh...

You didn't address it. You 'offered' this:

If the government is preventing less expensive treatments from being available to the public (which is at the root of your concern), then such laws should be overturned, allowing less expensive treatments to exist.

Do you really think the sole reason that health care is so prohibitively expensive is the Government preventing less expensive treatments from being available? Might it have anything to do with drug patents and pharmaceutical companies that spend more money on marketing than they do on research and development?

That right there has always boggled my mind. Why the hell should drugs need to be marketed? "This is what our drug can treat, this is when you would prescribe it and these are the contraindications" seems to me to be the extent of the "marketing" that should be required for prescription drugs.

The public services are funded through an unjustifiable rights violation

I don't see any of the examples I cited as an "unjustifiable rights violation".

Competition among private services gives private companies an incentive to provide the best possible service at the lowest price

Is that why the cost of text messaging has increased from free to $0.02/ea to $0.10/ea to $0.15/ea to $0.20/ea? Is that why my cable bill goes up each year even though they face competition from satellite and even the telco (in some areas)? Is that why nearly every major credit card company adopts fee increases and draconian policies like universal default at the same time?

I admire your faith in the free market but history doesn't seem to justify it. It seems to me that smaller more nimble companies will be focused on providing the best service at the best price but that eventually they grow to a size where it becomes easier to just gobble up most of the competition and establish a oligopoly with those that are too big to buy out. The cellular industry is the perfect example of this. We are now down to just four major carriers all of whom have the exact same anti-consumer policies. None of whom have any incentive to change them. All of whom are using their riches to buy up spectrum to stop anyone new from entering the market.

I'll grant you that in some cases the Government deserves some blame for this (cable franchise agreements come to mind) but I just don't share your faith in that things would be any different under a true laissez-faire type system.