Asymmetrical Information

Speaking of Markets. The Intrade and Iowa Presidential Markets have both shown Bush gains today. I've been posting hourly updates on my blog.

Bruce Bartlett reports that the stock market does best with divided government, and best of all with a Democratic President trying to deal with a Republican Congress.

http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_bartlett/bartlett200311260921.asp

Maybe that's the real reason why Soros is trying so hard to sink Bush, to boost the stock market.

" The Intrade and Iowa Presidential Markets have both shown Bush gains today"

Tradesports had Bush up from 51.5 last night to 56 a couple hours ago ... BUT he just plunged across the board to 48 -- down about five points or more in all the close state races as well.
http://www.tradesports.com/

Did some news just get break? Or did somebody with a pile of money to be just think 56 was too high?

At IEM earlier today I noted contract prices were totalling to more than 100.

It's not just somebody taking a plunge at Tradesports.

Bush has flipped into the underdog with all the bookies in Britain still taking bets, by as much as 4/9.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Presidential_04/RCP_Markets.html

Can't get current quotes from IEM. Traffic seems high and connections slow all over the place. Especially there is understandable, I guess.

Tail wagging the dog... First exit polls show Kerry up. This is a great time to short Kerry. The main reason being that people generally don't trust people with two first names (e.g. their last name is a common first name). Kerry/Edwards is one letter (s) away from having a double dose of that.

"This is a great time to short Kerry"

With Bush freefalling down to 37 at tradesports, 32 at IEM, right now is even *better*!

Ten years from now when the volume on all this wagering is *way* up, there's arbitraging, people are laying off real-world risks in the election markets, this is all going to be quite interesting.

"This is a great time to short Kerry."

Hey, you were right!

I told you guys to short Kerry. As of this morning, I am a billionaire and George Soros is scrubbing my toilet with his socks and small container of Comet.

Jim, rule number 1 of politics from the local to national level:

Angry people don't win.

Did anyone catch Kerry's speech yesterday morning? He said George Bush wanted to privatize Social Security in order to give his buddies on Wall Street who will manage the private acccounts a $1 trillion payoff. What a dork.

"Jim, rule number 1 of politics from the local to national level: Angry people don't win."

I've been trying to warn Brad DeLong and his friends about that for two years.

But it's futile. They really think that since '92 they've lost the Presidency, Senate, House, state governorships and state legislatures by ever worsening numbers because Dubya cheated on his reserve requirement and Republicans are bad people.

It's the anger follows denial thing -- nature taking it's course, can't be helped.

But it does turn out Krugman was right about one thing in politics: he said it was a "momentous event" when Gore and the Democrats embraced Dean's politics of anger and jettisoned the Geparhdts and all who were too nice.

Sure was -- it left Bush getting a larger share of the popular vote than any Democrat has gotten since LBJ, in spite of being saddled with the worst economy since Hoover!

Now that the election is over, MSM will stop their Great Depression propaganda. This will allow a Kerry-Free economic boom to occur.

Commenting here on some Megan postings from
Instapundit, starting out with the economy to
tie it into this thread:

> Iraq and Afghanistan together have cost us less than $300 billion,
> including the money Bush is going to ask for next year. In the same
> period, the US economy will have grossed about 36 trillion dollars,
> meaning that the war will have cost us less than 1% of our income.
> ...
> His efforts so far haven't even done that much damage to the
> deficit, much less the US economy.

btw, I know that in relative terms the cost of the war, or the size of
the deficit, may seem small. However those are still large numbers and
I hope libertarians don't get too accustomed to thinking like the
major parties re: spending other people's money since its small in
comparison to the large budget they have, or the size of the economy.
$300 billion still effectively translates to taking the income of 7
million households or so for a cause they may not agree with.

I tend to think in terms of the "unseen", what that money (or debt
capital) wasn't then doing in the private sector to get perspective.
Obviously it would be spread around vs. in large lump sums, but just
to note the magnitude, picture how much progress on various medical
research, nanotechnology, energy sources, intelligent tutoring
systems, smart highways that drive the cars to cut down on congestion,
etc. it could have seeded 3 million new small businesses with $100k
startup money, or 300,000 tech startups with $1million seed, or 30,000
with a larger $10 million round. How many big companies,
breakthroughs, etc, might have resulted? again, not that I want the
govt. to be a VC, and I know the money wouldn't have been used for
these, but just to give perspective that it may seem a small % of the
economy but when put into growing businesses rather than govt. it can
lead to an impact.

>I will not attribute magical powers to the president to heal the
>economy, large-scale social problems, or the growing rift between my
>boyfriend and myself on the matter of green vegetables.

thats between the two of you, but I'd vote they should be purple... :-)

> If we want to see our programmes enacted, it won't help us to change
> the system (proportional representation is the usual magic bullet of
> choice for libertarians) if we don't first change America -- at which
> point we won't need to change the system.

re: "change America" is part of why we need to focus as much as
possible of course on spreading libertarian approaches (including the
transitional ones some accuse the LP of not working on, which Cato
does) vs. being worried about which big govt. path is worse.

I agree that the important thing is to get people to think in a
libertarian fashion and there are multiple approaches that can be
taken to do that simultaneously, to market the ideas and get them to
diffuse throughoug society akin to tech innovation marketing (see
books like "Crossing the Chasm", or more sociological research works
like the "Diffusion of Innovation") Think tanks like Cato, the Reason
Foundation work on policy and spreading their ideas. Various
magazines, blogs, etc, try to spread the word that way usually to an
audience somewhat sympathetic to the ideas (or they wouldn't choose to
be reading them).

While those high powered air strikes go for the influential
sophisticated already softened targets :-) The LP provides the ground
troops that go out and attempt to reach the masses that otherwise
wouldn't be hearing about libertarian thought since they aren't even
reading the analysis articles in the WSJ say which quote Cato. People
fear new (to them), different ideas and hence it takes repetition for
them to begin to become comfortable with the ideas, for them to become
familiar, even before they consider accepting them (aside from open
minded early adopter types, etc), especially because many of those
most likely to initially become libertarians don't like following and
paying attention to traditional politics so they don't see the bits of
libertarian thought sneaking in from Cato, etc.

Most news media is event driven rather than idea driven. They don't
talk about political philosophy or detailed policy thoughts much
except when they seep into stories about the horse race and a bit in
opinion pieces. Local Libertarian parties are able to (painfully
slowly) penetrate the local media easier than the national media and
get exposure for the ideas. Its slow going now but at some point
general awareness of libertarians will drastically increase the pace
we can market to lead people accross the "chasm" :-) The more votes
libertarians get, the more credibility the LP gets, etc., and the more
likely people are to discover they know someone who is a libertarian
or at least who decided to vote for them sometimes.

btw,actually I've tended to hear proportional representation being
mostly pushed by the greens. At least around here they are the ones
stuck on proportional representation as being the big thing, or (more
useful perhaps) some sort of instant runoff/preference voting. Its
something to work on, but not a magic bullet. Lobbying and bill
proposals may be made to Demopublicans friendly on particular issues
even without being in office, there is no reason to wait for that (as
Cato shows re: non-partisan pushing of policies to congress) and may
be able to attract media coverage to help then spread the ideas. The
major difference with one elected person in a legislative body is
simply one vote and one guaranteed sponsor. The debate needs to be
entered at the non-federal level also and local think tanks won't do
the whole job in most places.

I won't go into it here, but I think people have only seen the tip of
the iceberg re: the impact the net will have on future media with
better software evolving over time (stay tuned :-)) and as people get
used to the net, digital paper arives to being to turn print media
into online media, etc. getting past the media monopoly will have benefits that dwarf the impact of the LP under the current media (part of why
i wasn't out there campaigning :-) )
but the LP has a role...

Unfortunately many small-l libertarians who are off at think tanks or
at magazines or blogs writing about ideas, in a sense the "elites"
of the movement, too often infight with the activists
who may have more time and motivation but have less political
knowledge/persuasive skills, perhaps be less intellectual (than the
writers, still moreso than most Demopublicans), and perhaps be less
than ideal spokespeople. Perhaps instead they might consider assisting
the less polished ground troops in the shared fight who mean well and
expend effort, rather than waiting for perfect activists. As more
marketing is done better activists will be discovered within the
larger pool of potential candidates.

How good are most Demopublican candidates as spokespeople for
whatever the heck their parties supposedly stand for? Actually
many candidates here have noted that they've actually been succesful
making the Demopublican candidates they are debating or seeing at
shared campaign events aware of ideas they hadn't considered before.

The public often doesn't think in abstract terms and the candidates help
illustrate the thoughts in terms of their own local geographic area. and
when they aren't moonbats :-) illustrate closer to hand that perhaps these
are intelligent decent folks worthy of consideration (even if not yet
ready to "waste" their vote on them). Any change in voting processes
(instant runoff, proportional representation) which gets more exposure for
libertarian candidates or allows them to avoid the "wasted vote" issue
helps even if its not a silver bullet, it speeds the diffusion process.

> MORE WORDS OF WISDOM ON ELECTIONS from economist Steve Lansburg:
> Surely there's not much difference between a world where Bush gets 3
> more votes than Kerry and a world where Kerry gets 3 more votes than
> Bush. If Bush is the rightful president in one of those worlds, he's
> got to be darn close to rightful in the other.

this is why there is more of a reason to vote for the LP candidate
when things are close :-)

"rightful president" or at least equally lowest common denominator candidates
appealing to the superficial image driven public thriving
on soundbites and voting without enough information or understanding.
the best "big government" candidate won.

When there isn't as much difference between the candidates then rather
than rational discussion which might show this then marketing wise
they go for an attempt to differentiate them. there is more of an
emotional attempt to create the right brand image for the candidates
and to create fear of the other candidate by exagerating the
differences and usually creating a strawman.

Jean: I suggest you open up a thread for all of us from Instapundit that want to comment here. I liked your posts over there a lot. Congratulations and God bless :)

> I think the big story of this election was
> distributed information.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg of
what is to come, which is why I see hope
for the future for future meritocractic
spread of ideas including libertarian ones.

The true power of the net to catalyze the
distributed cooperation (and competition) of the millions (eventually billions) of minds and processors connected to it has only begun to be explored. bits and pieces of the ideas are
out there, it'll be interesting to discover what
works and how it evolves. Stay tuned...
time to get back on track building software :-)

Interesting to note that the Market Tanked when the news of the first exit polls showing a Kerry win. It wasn't a small blip either. The market understands that Liberal Democratic policies suck capital out of the markets and people's pockets. They understand that letting people keep more of their money increases investment. Interesting to note that with the tax cuts IRS receipts were up last year. Same effect that the Reagan and Kennedy tax cuts had.

Now if we could only get congress to cut back on the pork spending.

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