Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 UT

Futarchy, A form of Government using Predictive Betting Markets
Darius Bacon mentioned futarchy to me yesterday. I'd heard the word once or twice, but hadn't really investigated. Science News had the first article I read about predictive betting markets. The Futarchy abstract from Robin Hanson's page has a nice quote:
To have a say in a speculative market, you have to "put your money where your mouth is." Those who know they are not relevant experts shut up, and those who do not know this eventually lose their money, and then shut up.
This may be the best form of government I've seen yet. I've been disillusioned with capitalism recently because one of its pathological cases is monopoly. The existing monopolies in software and music really cut into my pursuit of happiness, and thus I have often wondered if there's another system that selects more for merit rather than profit. This may be it.
In any case, I'd like to run a betting market on Lambda the Ultimate. Then the C++ fanatics could bet against the Haskell fanatics and we'd find out who's really right. But then, that's what the ICFP contest is all about, right?
Tom Moertel has a post today about Top-ten weblog usability mistakes. I just fixed two of my mistakes, I added an about page, and the linked author pictures you can see in the top right of this page. The three things I need to work on are, categorizing my posts, providing navigation other than the calendar, and getting the titles and text of my entries into my RSS feed.

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