Comments on: Cheap Talk

By: jackd

jackd — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 04:20:00 +0000

I’d prefer a system in which a pundit’s record could be evaluated and displayed along with any opinion he or she puts out in public. The devil is in the implementation, of course, as I’m sure there would be a noisy contingent supporting virtually any absurdity as being correct. Personally I’m convinced that for a glaring example Bill Kristol has been so egregiously wrong that no responsible organization would publish his idiocy, but there are people with actual money who disagree.

By: Zamfir

Zamfir — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:31:58 +0000

PG, I would say bets alone would suffice for that purpose, people could show the seriousness of a particular text by the size of the bet they are willing to take. There would still be room for offcial columns with interesting-but-I wouldn’t-bet-on-it arguments. In principle such a system could grow to a situation where columnists are expected, by the public, only to publish articles of high certainty, but I suspect that people would also be happy with uncertain-but-interesting views.

Still, I don’t like the idea at all. it would just encourage people to write columns like politicians, with weasel words and hidden terms. That’s unavoidable in real politics, but opinion pieces are mostly entertainment, and they should stay that way.

By: PG

PG — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:55:02 +0000

Why not have one place for the arguments whose substance we should take as the expression of the columnist’s sincere beliefs, on which he should be willing to bet, and another place for playing out wacky novel arguments that might lead to new heuristics? Certainly the fact that so many columnists now also have blogs seems like we have a tidy binary set up, and the existence of JournoList and similar “off the record” debating ventures for prominent people to work out kinks in their ideas means that the columnists themselves probably would like the idea.

So if William Kristol is saying in the print version of the Weekly Standard that we ought to invade Iraq because of the danger of WMDs, he should be betting on our finding the WMDs; but if he says only in a blog that we should invade Iraq because it’ll be so cheap due to our being welcomed as liberators, then he oughtn’t get too much grief if it turns out otherwise.

I think it’s reasonably for a publication to pay opinionators only for the opinions they’re willing to back with their own money, but to provide online space, research and editorial staff for more uncertain claims. As with what gets knocked about on JournoList, the dubious online argument of today might become the fairly well-reasoned dead-tree printed column of tomorrow.

By: Henry

Henry — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:19:38 +0000

Urgh – I meant to say “posts on the argument that …” and somehow screwed up. Corrected.

By: Lee

Lee — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:51:33 +0000

“Tyler Cowen has a couple of posts arguing that columnists (and others) should be required to bet their views. ”

He argues against that view in the post you link to. (Did you intend to link to Bryan Caplan?)

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:21:46 +0000

… it could also be a breakthrough in micro-payments: I may not be willing to pay you a dollar for a post: but I might bet a dollar one way or the other on the outcome. If structured with a small cut (both ways) for the market-making firms and opinion jockeys, you could see real money on a well-trafficked post.

By: joel turnipseed

joel turnipseed — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:13:26 +0000

Funny you should mention this, Henry. I have just started exchanging e-mails with some friends/acquaintances on how to implement bets regarding my posts at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

I think that if there were some kind of Digg.com instant link that made it easy to include bets (and report on current markets in) Op-Eds, blog posts, and the like we could have it both ways (especially since the prescient would make [some] money and people like to make money as well as watch people who make money [sad, but true—esp. in the U.S.]).