I’ve noticed numerous commenters on the political blogs that I follow make very strong statements about the results of the presidential election this fall… usually along the lines of X has no chance
or sometimes just plain old Y will win
. All of these people sound supremely confident that they’re right, which indicates that at least some of them are probably going to look pretty silly in five months’ time.
People looking silly online isn’t a concern of mine; I mean, really, that’s what online is here for. No, I think that the thing to do is to make a little money off of it.
It works like this: suppose you get someone (call them X) who is absolutely positive that Bush is going to win. (There’s a fair number of people who express this opinion around.) If X is serious in their opinion, and at all rational, then they should be more than willing to accept the proposition:
I’ll bet you $100 against $100,000 that Kerry will win.
…because after all, in the world of their personal expected value calculations, you are offering them $100. Seriously. And while it’s possible that you might have to walk them through how to work out the mean of a probability model, it’s really not particularly hard in this case.
Now if they refuse to bet with you, then you can probably force them into an admission that they’re not as confident as they actually want people to believe… which is at least a rhetorical win, which can pass for currency in the blogosphere. If they take the bet, then the thing to do is hedge yourself by finding an equally fervent supporter of Kerry and goad them into a similar proposition. Result: you’ll lose some small amount of money on one side of the column, and win a much much larger one on the other. Not so shabby.
I suppose this is actually an advantage of having such a polarised electorate: it creates a truly lovely little arbitrage of this sort, since each side is going to be convinced that they’re going to win because losing would be disastrous. Of course, I suppose this is only an advantage
if one is willing to sacrifice all other political and ideological concerns for the sake of making a quick buck (or more to the point, thousands upon thousands of quick bucks). Somehow, I doubt that there’s any shortage of such people.