Tyler's Turn Blog

For what it's worth: According to an article written by Joce Berg, et al, and published in the International Journal of Forecasting (there's a journal for everything), prediction markets, like Intrade, are 74% more accurate for long time horizons -- 100 days out -- than polls. The conclusion is that you're better off at this stage in the race to read the prediction markets than the polling data.

The closer we get to election day, the less differentiation there is between polling accuracy and prediction market accuracy (although prediction markets remain slightly more accurate).

Download a pdf of the article here.

When I was in Junior High, I read the Asimov Robot and Foundation series, and became enamored with the Cities. These were mostly underground complexes that stretched over vast swaths of land. People could live in the Cities and never go outside. I know. I know. My Junior High paradise is most people's hell, but I loved the idea.

Now, architects in Dubai are proposing an entire city housed in one massive skyscraper, called the Ziggurat. My favorite part of the plan is the transportation provided through "an integrated 360 degree network (horizontally and vertically) so cars would be redundant." Cool!

If anyone ever builds it -- and I wouldn't put it past those oil-rich Dubai nuts -- I definitely want to visit. Although, I'm not sure I'd want to live in a City any more. Where would I walk the dogs without a Boston Hill?

As a believer in free markets, one of my favorite prediction tools is Intrade. The idea of Intrade is that people are allowed to buy and trade shares in things like the likelihood that Al Gore will be the next president, who will win Best Supporting Actor at the Emmies, whether Russian troops will enter Tblisi, etc.

People can make or lose real money on these trades, so they're more likely to seriously consider before making a choice. Looking at the Presidential election, one of the surprising facts is that Hillary Clinton is still trading in the $3.50 range. Barack Obama has recently dropped from a high of $68 to $60, and he continues to drop this week despite the so-called "convention polling bump." However, John McCain continues to hold steady, just under $40, which isn't hopeful for him.

I haven't done a study to see how accurate Intrade is at making election predictions (or invasion predictions for that matter), but I enjoy watching the markets.

As the name of Joe Biden was bandied about in the past few weeks, and then when he became the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, I kept getting him confused in my mind with Richard Lugar. Lugar was my Senator in Indiana, and is one of the most well-reasoned voices regarding foreign policy in the federal government. So, it took me a while to figure out why I was confusing one of my favorite Republicans with Biden, the Democratic Senator from Delaware.

Then it dawned on me.

Biden and Lugar have been the chairs of the Foreign Relations Committee for years -- sometimes one is the chair, and sometimes the other, depending on which party is ascendant. During the past eight years, their committee has often been the only sane voice coming out of Washington (particularly regarding Iraq), and the two chairs have worked hard to make it a truly bipartisan committee. In the build up to the war, they were the ones asking the question the Bush Administration continually ignored: "Do we have a plan for what we'll do after the invasion?"

I could think of worse people to be advising Barack Obama on foreign policy than Richard Lugar's bipartisan partner, Joe Biden.