Steven Greene points to piece on the Pentagon’s "terror futures" market written by professors of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. They argue that the idea of a futures market for world events is an idea that could very well work.
Even if the futures market isn’t that great an idea, the real damage is in the way Congress and the Pentagon brass reacted. We need to be rewarding innovation and thinking outside the box in the war on terror. We cannot afford complacency in any form. The message Congress sent to DARPA is that anything outside the status quo will cause heads to roll, and that kind of message only hurts the ability of this nation to defend itself against terrrorism.
UPDATE: Oliver Kamm argues that the futures market was a bad idea – but so was the reaction from Congress. He’s got some very salient points about why a predictive market for terrorism might encourage false intelligence.
Here’s an interesting piece on Idea Futures markets I found in the Extropy Institute’s backlogs- give it a look.
http://www.extropy.org/ideas/journal/previous/1999/06-01.html
We need to be rewarding innovation and thinking outside the box in the war on terror.
Yeah, innovations like Total Information Awareness? Great fuckin’ idea. Why is it that these conservatives get a lot of milage out of “no big government, hooray for freedom” and then turn around and enact ridiculous Big Brother programs like TIA and the Patriot Act?
Time to bring the War on Terror home, I think. Bring it right to Capitol Hill.
need help from the UN?
😉
Vincent, UN is nothing without US. Name one military action that UN has taken without our major involvement. Go ahead.
Final analysis- they dropped the program so they could concentrate their efforts on Totalitarian Information Awareness. Leave it to the government, on either side of the divide, to choose top-down approaches to a chaordic, market-driven one. {sigh)