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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Putting money where one’s mouth is Tyler Cowen has an interesting post up about the whole business of pundits betting their own money on their views. Economics students may remember a particularly satisfying one involving the late, great Julian L. Simon and the alarmist writer Paul Ehrlich. Simon, who might be thought as a “cornucopian” writer, bet that the price of a basket of commodities would not, when adjusted for inflation, rise over a certain period. Erhlich had been claiming that commodities were running out at an alarming pace and their price would therefore skyrocket. He lost the bet. Simon suggested they have another go but Erhlich, being at least not totally stupid, decided not to accept the offer. The affair has not blunted his views, a fact that demonstrates the incorrigibility of some so-called academics.
I wonder if there controversies over which you’d be prepared to stake a few pounds, dollars or pints of beer?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Yes, I bet that house prices would crash and that JPY would rise and that AUD would rebound. What I didn’t see coming was the interest rate cuts. Ah well.
Any economics or property correspondent who waffles on about the topic without either being long or short of shares or property (and disclosing the same) shouldn;t be taken seriously.
AGW is the obvious choice, but unfortunately defining the terms of the bet would be difficult. Since nasty man-made CO2 causes high temperatures, low temperatures, floods, droughts, storms, doldrums and everything bad on the planet, getting an AGW supporter to admit their prophecies have failed is impossible.
Try asking a believer how many years of static or falling temperatures with rising CO2 it would take for them to admit their theory is wrong and they will mumble about ‘hidden heat’ and ‘back with a vengeance’ and ‘natural forces’, but they will never commit to a period.
On another tack, Carl Pham, in the comments over at Rand’s place, suggest that, (and I paraphrase), that if Obama, Pelosi and Reid were sentenced to hang on December 31st 2009 if the DJI was below 7000 and unemployment was above 7%, you can bet they would be cutting taxes and abolishing anti-business regulations like mad.
Now that’s the kind of bet I’d like to see!
Tee hee. Re what Kevin says … from a recent BBC article (click my name for link to BBC article)…
“The UK had its coldest winter for 13 years, bucking a recent trend of mild temperatures, the Met Office has said. … The Met Office added that global warming had prevented this winter from being even colder.”
So even a particularly cold winter is taken as evidence of AGW.
NB – I thought Al Gore effectively took the bet that sea levels wouldn’t rise by buying a beach front property?
Entrant for Quote of the Day:
“We will always stand by our government. If we stand behind them they shit on us and if we stand in front of them they fuck us.” – grafitti on a (poor) Venezuelan street.
My standing bet is that any government project will always cost from 2-3 times the estimated cost.
Tangentially, I have sometimes bet dinner companions of a more statist flavor that if they can name any human activity in which the government of the US is not involved by legislation or regulation, I will buy dinner. Haven’t lost yet.
The latter is especially enlightening to the average, not overly political person who just believes what they see on TV, and can’t imagine why I’m upset over a few rules that only affect rich people or some greedy businessmen or degenerate drug addicts, etc.
It’s amazing how little ordinary citizens realize the mesh of laws, codes, and regulations that bind them in everything they do, buy, or make.
I remember a radio show, in a more innocent day. “Truth or Consequences,” I think it was called.
One day they gave a contestant a pack of cigarettes at the beginning of the show, and told them to come back before the end of the show. Their task was to use the pack in the manner intended, without breaking any laws.
This was a time when cigarettes were perfectly respectable. Even so, the contestant was careful to the point of paranoia. He realized he had to go out in the world and smoke a cigarette, legally, then return to claim the prize.
He explained all the care he had taken. “Give me the pack of cigarettes,” the quizmaster said. “Ah,” he said. “You fail. You didn’t destroy the tax stamp when you opened the packet.” Nor had the contestant; nobody did. The tax stamp held the pack of cigarettes neatly together whilst you tapped one out of the corner you’d torn.
Fifty years ago, in a more forgiving climate, that show made a business of bets like that. Today? I’m in the business of writing the occasional mystery, and tell my friends that in order to keep sharp, I commit at least one felony a week. They challenge me, and I list a felony.
“That doesn’t count! It’s not a real felony,” they say. But dear hearts, if I were hauled into court, it’d prove more real than I’d like to encounter. We all have our favorite felonies.
And that, good gentles, is my bet. With a lawyer, and a gentle hour’s interrogation, I assert that my disputant will turn out to have committed a felony within the last seven days. Never lost yet. So far, I’ve needed neither the lawyer nor the hour.
I would love to bet any US White House budget director (regardless of party) that their five your forecast will not come within 20% of their predicted numbers (positive or negative). Specifically: GDP beyond 2 years out will be significantly off, and by 5 years it’ll be way off. Estimated government revenues (which are ultimately a factor of the wealthy’s contribution to GDP) will actually be a slightly more accurate prediction in the first couple of years but be way off the mark by the time you get out to 5 years. And government expenditures will be underestimated every year in both nominal and real terms, with the 5 year estimates being off by well over 10% (i.e. a few hundred billion dollars).
When arguing with a friend that the late 90s surplus was a complete accident, I basically did some of this research up through 2001. Not a single budget predicted the surplus until the year it actually occured. Clinton’s first budgets basically predicted the annual deficit to flatline during his budget’s time horizon (5 years typically). Needless to say, no one predicted the dot com boom OR bust. Frankly, the fact that their year to year predictions were as close as they were came as a minor shock.
This is why Obama’s budget forecast which are based on extremely optimistic growth numbers doesn’t pass the smell test (never mind the silly belief that after this year he and congress will be much more fiscally conservative to allow the revenues to “catch up”). That’s a bet I’d take any day of the week.
Rosie Scenario has moved into the White House.
LOL @ Venezuelan QOTD. So funny, so true, so sad.
On another tack, Carl Pham, in the comments over at Rand’s place, suggest that, (and I paraphrase), that if Obama, Pelosi and Reid were sentenced to hang on December 31st 2009 if the DJI was below 7000 and unemployment was above 7%, you can bet they would be cutting taxes and abolishing anti-business regulations like mad.
No they wouldn’t. They’d pass a law dictating the level of the DOW and change the way unemployment is calculated. These are statists – they think everything can be solved with the application of state power.
If these pundits don’t want to stake their otherwise worthless claims on something tangibly valuable to them — like money — then we can do it for them, by dealing their reputations a blow when their theories are shown to be hopeless at actually being useful. So, for example, in Ehrlich’s case, we should just ignore him, and scorn anyone who doesn’t. Simple, no?
Now to wonder why this isn’t happening in the media right now…
PS. You might want to sort out the tab order on your site 😉 Pressing tab when the cursor is in the “name” field sends me off somewhere random; another press brings me back to “email address”, and so on.
Nice thought, GF, but it doesn’t (Link) seem to work that way (at least among the financial pundits).
While taking bets on opposing views might be emotionally satisfying, invoking a bet or accepting one isnt making an argument.
No one said it was an argument. It is a demonstration of your conviction, tangible evidence that you actually believe the truth of the position you are advancing. However, the opposite may be true: the failure to “put your money where your mouth is” may in fact be a refutation of your argument.
I’d bet that the government will invoke the Civil Contingencies Act at least once before June 3, 2010. I’d bet a bottle of decent malt.
I bet the price and availability of ammunition and ‘evil black rifles’ come down substantially after the revolution.
Laird:
The strength of belief in one’s argument should not be mistaken for the merits of the argument itself.
Refutation of an argument is only possible by argument itself. A crackpot may issue an opinion and not be willing to bet on it, but if facts validate the opinion, it matters not the reasons for the crackpot’s unwillingness to bet.
Yes, but it should matter to the crackpot himself. Even (/especially?) crackpots should not be deprived of an opportunity to improve themselves by diminishing their crackpottiness:-)
Furthermore, there’s a considerable difference between some crackpot opinions spouted in a bar to a group of friends, and the kind of crackpot opinions that get turned into legislation by a bunch of evil halfwits.
The barflies don’t affect me. The evil halfwits are the ones who direct the nation.
I occasionally bet on elections – took a bet on the outcome of a provincial election against a senior strategist for an opposing party, and lost $10, took a bet on the outcome of the last US Presidential race at odds(we called it in January at 3:1 for the Democrat), and lost that too. The first one was a stupid bet in retrospect, but I stand by the second, at least at the time I made it.
Unfortunately, I’m decidedly lacking in counterparties for interesting, substantive bets on major issues other than partisan politics. There’s a few I’d lay willingly, and a lot more if my finances improved sufficiently for me to cover the bets, but they seem difficult to write in a convincing fashion for me at present.
That said, anyone interested in some higher-level bets might be interested in the Long Bets arena run by the Long Now Foundation – see http://www.longbets.org/ for more info, but basically, the money is staked on a bet of arbitrary length(several run into decades, a few into centuries), with the money paid out to a charity of the winner’s choice. There’s a lot of them built around important issues, and it’s an interesting enough project to be worth some support as well.
Unfortunately, barflies vote, and usually for the evil halfwits.
Simon won his bet – but the left write the history books.
For example, on radio shows talking about the B.B.C. Science Fiction season (yes the B.B.C. runs shows discussing its own shows) the Club of Rome is praised as a great source of wisdom.
Needless to say no non leftist S.F. had been part of the season – it is all environmentalism and so on.
It is ever thus.
Libertarians and conservatives may write best selling books (in Science Fiction or other areas), but the left gets to decide what is taught in universities and in the media (which is made up of the products of those universities) so nonleftist books tend to get forgotten after a generation of so.
Hopefully with the decline of the mainstream media and the rise of the internet this may change.
But only if the “education system” finally dies.
Simon won his bet – but the left write the history books.
For example, on radio shows talking about the B.B.C. Science Fiction season (yes the B.B.C. runs shows discussing its own shows) the Club of Rome is praised as a great source of wisdom.
Needless to say no non leftist S.F. had been part of the season – it is all environmentalism and so on.
It is ever thus.
Libertarians and conservatives may write best selling books (in Science Fiction or other areas), but the left gets to decide what is taught in universities and in the media (which is made up of the products of those universities) so nonleftist books tend to get forgotten after a generation of so.
Hopefully with the decline of the mainstream media and the rise of the internet this may change.
But only if the “education system” finally dies.
Still I am dodging your question J.P.
I could also avoid it by saying that “economics is NOT prediction” and it is not.
However, there are certain informed guesses one can make so I will make one.
American economic output (in real terms) will be lower in November 2012 than it is now.
Now there is a specific prediction and a politically important one.
And I am prepared to bet both my kidneys and my liver or it – all in good shape.
Come on leftists!
Show your courage – bet your bodily organs against mine. With the loser to have them cut out by the winner.
Surely you are have faith in THE ONE.