Is Intrade really that useful?
When I read this, what I really see is “markets are not very useful.” That’s what Intrade is. So I’m baffled.
The suggestion that pundits might be as accurate as prediction markets is not only empirically false, but is a mere analogue to saying that bureaucrats can coordinate economic activity as well as markets can.
It’s not that any one indicator (punditry, polls, animal spirits) is better than others, it’s that markets can allow people to trade on ALL of that information + other information that would normally just get dumped into model error. That’s the beauty of the market price as a mechanism for information aggregation.
Very strange…
