Stickybuffalo.com

as much as i’d like to believe this is true…

Traders on the University of Iowa’s real money Iowa Electronic Markets believe control of the U.S. House of Representatives is a toss-up after this fall’s mid-term Congressional elections.

…it vexes me that my university, and a lot of other people who ought to damn well know better by now, are still tacitly promoting the view that financial markets constitute some sort of transcendent superhuman hive mind that can actually see into the future — rather than dumb machines that are occasionally and incidentally useful for purposes of getting shit done, but whose primary function has never been anything more or less than to make certain assholes richer than certain other assholes, usually at the expense of the rest of us.

of course, the Iowa Electornic Markets’ promoters will say, i’m misrepresenting their claims — their futures market is merely an interesting social experiment. they don’t claim to predict the future, only to gauge other people’s predictive instincts in a more reliable way than conventional polling does, by tying the outcomes to participants’ rational self-interest. that’s not out-and-out stupid, i’ll grant. and it’s true that certain kinds of questions — if formulated in the right way, and subject to carefully calibrated laboratory controls — are conducive to being answered in a meaningful way with an approach like this.

but that kind of nuance is secondary to the message that IEM’s “research” is designed to pump out year after year, and generally lost on the readers of newspaper articles like the above, which dutifully publish every copy-pasted press release they get from the UI Tippie College of Business, right down to strategically vague and unsubstantiated claims like the following:

Begun in 1988, the IEM is a research and teaching tool that has achieved an impressive prediction record, substantially superior to alternative mechanisms such as opinion polls. Such markets have been significantly more accurate than traditional tools in predicting outcomes ranging from political election results to movie box office receipts.

the point that’s flogged again and again, in 22 years of publicity literature out of the IEM, isn’t anything so subtle or academic as the observation that human decision-making is a complex phenomenon that’s further complicated by economic considerations. no, the take-away, in case you missed it, is that market behavior — the most potent distillation of human reason, purified of wishful thinking and ideological cant, incentivized with the prospect of real financial reward and punishment, and massively aggregated by high-speed computer networks — is “significantly more accurate than traditional tools in predicting outcomes.” you’re not being asked to consider the truth of this statement within the qualified and elaborately engineered context of the experiments that are actually being carried out, you’re just supposed to internalize the austrian-school dogma that Markets are smarter than mere humans, and way, way smarter than human political and social institutions. the Market, in its most ideal (read: unregulated, unimpeded, unaccountable) form, is an algorithm so powerful that it can actually predict the future.

this may have been a tenable position as recently as early 2008, but anybody still seriously espousing it ought to be publicly ridiculed, then tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail. so the IEM has successfully predicted “movie box office receipts” — good for them! where were they on lehman brothers? on madoff? did the omniscient Market see the BP oil spill coming? if they did, it could only have been because investors knew the company was taking unconscionable risks in order to maximize short-term gains — and the Market has never balked at wreaking massive environmental (or social, or political, or even economic) damage when short-term gains were on the line.

it’s long past time to put this discredited, obsolete premise to bed. the Iowa Electronic Markets, like most attempts to assert economics as a straightforward empirical discipline encompassing a comprehensive and reliable theory of human behavior, is junk science. or rather, at best, it can’t tell us anything useful if we can’t figure out how to ask it the right questions. and as long as the people asking the questions are only interested insofar as they stand to make or lose a buck in the short run, we never will.

First, everything not fairly closely-related to environmental issues:

• “Krugs” throws old, familiar charges of alienating his primary base of support, in a futile quest for “postpartisanship,” at President Obama. Charges still stick.
• While subjecting Facebook and its pimple-faced kid billionaire to growing scrutiny, let us not forget about that other Great Cyber-Satan.
• Optimistic (or worried?) that Americans have learned a new and lasting sense of thrift? Rejoice (or despair).
• Flipboard: I wonder if this is anything like how John Henry felt while watching technicians set up the version 1.0 steam drill.

This one is borderline: A Times op-ed calls the much-ballyhooed, and much taxpayer-subsidized, Chevy Volt an overpriced flop. (“W” encouraged talk of the “hydrogen highway,” and now electric cars are having their moment… bets on whether the next administration will raise flywheel technology to the rank of automotive savior?)

And the rest:

• The Economist arrives about a week late with coverage of the fizzling out of climate change legislation, apparently hoping to make up for the delay by publishing two largely interchangeable articles. The picture is, of course, bleak, but hey! Schadenfreude: “a patchwork of different rules in different states… may leave big energy firms regretting their opposition to cap and trade.” (Though we’ll probably just end up bailing them out, as we do with everything else that big businesses have cause to regret.)
• NPR’s science blog seems to spend a lot of time indulging in elliptical ruminations on the authors’ personal unresolved issues about science and non-secular philosophy. But this item was one of the rare breaks, and remarkably poignant; I thought about posting some sort of commentary, but there’s probably no just no real need.

In the same “non-news” category as “oil still leaking,” “U.S. economic recovery still unconvincing,” and “corporate executives still douchebags,” let’s not forget to include “United States Senate still ‘unfit for purpose,’” as our British friends might express it.

I mean, mother FUCK, can I some day maybe not have to read headlines like “legislation defeated in Senate by MINUS SIXTEEN VOTE MARGIN?” Because it isn’t funny anymore. Not ironically, not as black humor. It’s just FUCKING RETARDED, and yes, I don’t care; it’s actually so appalling that I’m going to go ahead and use the word “retarded” because however bad it may be to do so, this is an order of magnitude WORSE.

But, of course, aside from the fact that some day I’ll be dead, long before then I’ll probably get a break from this farce… once Democrats are back in the minority in the Senate, and the filibuster goes back to being a purely hypothetical right that the GOP will threaten to take away should it ever be used, and that the Democrats will actually be chickenshit enough to forego, completely ignoring the fact that had they challenged the “nuclear option” threat back in, say, 2005, and actually put an end the fucking thing assuming that the GOP wasn’t just bluffing, then “my” party might have been able to actually PASS GODDAMN LEGISLATION during those few years when they had both the presidency and majorities in the House and Senate, and just might have been able to avoid the clobbering which is likely return the assholes to the majority party in the Senate in the first place and oh, fuck it.