perfidy

The headline: "A Good Idea With Bad Press".

That pretty much describes the DARPA futures market proposal. I've been thinking about it more and I still think the dead-pool aspects, though a minor part of the overall proposal, make this something the government shouldn't be doing. In short, I think it's a fantastic idea except for the part where you can win money when people die. Even though that is not the focus of the program, critics were able to seize on it and their objections were never fully answered.

This is because the pointy-heads at DARPA have a huge PR problem. It's their job, I realize, to come up with the craziest ideas they can, in the hope they will make the US and world a safer place. The problem is they don't have anybody on staff who knows how to take out the crazy-talk when speaking to the press. Just check out the nutty charts on the DARPA site. It's all cutting-edge research and conceptualization, but without a smiling avuncular face to explain it, the improbable aspects dominate. 

The good part is, now that DARPA has made the idea current and public, a thousand private nonprofit futures markets like the one Ross is currently programming will come into being. Rather than one government-run system, we could end up with many distributed markets-- quite possibly a better scenario than the one recently retracted by DARPA.

[moreover]: A TechCentralStation column by James Pethokoukis puts to bed my main objections to this program: "Indeed, who cares about a "yuck factor" or terrorists pocketing a few grand if thousands of lives could be saved?"

Fair enough. When I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I personally wouldn't feel comfortable buying futures in terrorist acts, but I think the benefits clearly outweigh the yuckiness.