Bi-Weekly Discussion - The Uses & Abuses of Prediction Markets (Repeat)

About this event

This is going to be an online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry — it's easy to use and free to join. Click on the link above at the scheduled date/time to log in... \*\*\* *** THE USES & ABUSES OF PREDICTION MARKETS INTRODUCTION: NOTE: This is a repeat of our discussion back on Saturday, June 27th, since many of our regulars were not able to attend. As this meetup's regulars know, I often try to emphasize that being a "political agnostic" means being humble enough to recognize the limits of your own knowledge on a particular subject and realizing when you need to seek out an expert opinion. That's why I typically try to ground our discussions by linking to polls of academic experts or forecasts from think tanks when they're available. But there's sometimes a concern that the so-called "experts" often are not held accountable when they make wrong predictions or give policy advice that turns out to be bad in hindsight, and we know they can be biased on some contentious issues and that there's often many facets of an issue that these polls don't illuminate. That's why earlier this year, in a discussion on the Ukraine War (https://www.meetup.com/philadelphia-political-agnostics/events/311830427/), I also linked some prediction market bets being placed on the outcomes of battles in Ukraine. For those who aren't aware, prediction markets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market) are online exchanges established for trading bets on the outcome of various events including elections, sports games, the weather, celebrity gossip, and even wars. Their business model is similar to poker games at a casino - i.e. you're betting against other players rather than the house, but the house takes a cut. With money at stake, I figured that could reduce some of the bias we might expect in journalistic coverage of the Ukraine War and also give us some more granular estimates of the war's progress that you can't find in the think tanks forecasts or expert polls. However, some of our members pushed back by arguing that it's unlikely that anyone with deep knowledge of this conflict (esp. Ukrainians & Russians) wouldn't be biased. Several people also pointed out the potential risk of cash-strapped soldiers or lower-tier government officials engaging in insider trading based on knowledge of covert military operations - perhaps even betting against their own side. These sorts of debates have erupted into mainstream media focus in the ensuing months once it became clear that people with access to highly classified information engaged in insider trading ahead of the raid on Venezuela that captured Nicolas Maduro (https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/us-soldier-charged-in-connection-with-betting-on-maduro-raid-225900620.html) and the initial air strikes on Iran that killed the Ayatollah Khamenei (https://www.npr.org/2026/03/01/nx-s1-5731568/polymarket-trade-iran-supreme-leader-killing). Left-leaning journalists uncovered that the two biggest prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi, both hired Donald Trump Jr. as an "advisor" and the Trump administration responded by decreasing regulations on them (https://archive.ph/oLenT), even having the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sue states that tried to regulate them as gambling instead of event contracts. They also noticed that many bettors on these platforms appear to be risk-seeking, contrarian-thinking young men who often identify as MAGA or libertarians (https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2025/12/prediction-markets-and-the-suckerifcation-crisis-with-max-read/685330/) and who aspire to make some quick money off not only prediction markets but cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, NFTs, sports gambling, online poker (https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/the-rise-of-the-degen-why-gen-z-traders-are-going-for-broke-20260622-p608ur) \- i\.e\. the type of people most liberal journalists instinctively dislike and don't understand\, even as they lament