Matt Yglasias complains Climate Change Futures Markets would be manipulated: This idea has some merit, but let’s not get carried away with ourselves. The underlying intuition here is that talk about climate change is cheap, but if we made people put their money where their mouth is we’d force them to speak honestly. The problem is that when coal and oil interests or the Koch family pays people money to mislead people about climate science or clean energy policies they are putting their money where their mouth is. Big money is at stake in this issue, and it could be easily worthwhile for polluters to lose money on a prediction market if that helped undercut support for clean energy legislation. The problem is that just about any metric you might like becomes contaminated once people know there are large political economy stakes.
Rah Price Manipulators
Rah Price Manipulators
Rah Price Manipulators
Matt Yglasias complains Climate Change Futures Markets would be manipulated: This idea has some merit, but let’s not get carried away with ourselves. The underlying intuition here is that talk about climate change is cheap, but if we made people put their money where their mouth is we’d force them to speak honestly. The problem is that when coal and oil interests or the Koch family pays people money to mislead people about climate science or clean energy policies they are putting their money where their mouth is. Big money is at stake in this issue, and it could be easily worthwhile for polluters to lose money on a prediction market if that helped undercut support for clean energy legislation. The problem is that just about any metric you might like becomes contaminated once people know there are large political economy stakes.
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