What Is the Truth?

Geoff Mann, London Review of Books: The dubious achievement of prediction markets is to have found a new way to exacerbate and exploit the simultaneously frantic and passive experience of the world that is a defining aspect of our age. Like any kind of gambling, they are enervating. We put our money down and then (unless we are using a hairdryer on an airport thermometer) fidget anxiously till it’s over. The world happens to us. This passivity is characteristic of the politics of those who think we are stuck with the world we have. The best we can do is make money while events wash over us: ‘Don’t blame me. I didn’t start the war, I just bet on it.’ Such people may think they are ‘courageous’ or ‘gutsy’ because they take ‘risks’ (this is the way people in the financial sector have always talked), but the whole charade is a profitable supplication to, even a cowering before, the power of ‘the markets’. To put the case more gently, the appeal of ‘risk-taking’ just now, especially but…