on predicting the future
Polymarket and Guan Zhong
There are only so many ways that one can live, but nearly all of them involve speculating about the future, living one day solely with a desire to wake up for the next.
It is in this way that the future has always been less of a destination, and more of a marketplace. Somewhere to browse, to see what you’d like rather than rushing to a conclusion. The popularity of prediction markets indicates that we ask participants to wager on elections, interest rates, wars, court decisions, even the weather, reducing uncertainty into a price that rises and falls by the second. We remain convinced that if enough people agree upon tomorrow, tomorrow itself will feel obligated to listen.
The idea traces back to a bar in Iowa City in 1988, where three university economists, annoyed that the polls had missed Jesse Jackson’s win in Michigan, decided a market might predict an election better than a pollster could. When the votes came in that fall, the market had called the race closer than Gallup, Harris, or the Times.
However, with recent reports elaborating that prediction markets like Polymarket have falsely advertised their users winning tens of thousands of dollars, predicting the future seems to have come easy these days. The Iowan bettors who followed were real, and so was their money. The digital crowd that convinces us to bet today is not. It is not the same as Renaissance Italians betting on the papal conclave, yet it is the same principle: if you put enough money behind something, it may come true.
Why should anyone believe this forecast? It is solely a matter of social proof. If there are thousands of other people placing their money in this result – and seemingly becoming millionaires as a result of it – then, in a matter of moments, you’ve become the one left behind.
The principle has changed, now, then. If you put enough money behind something, there is no longer a chance it may come true. Someone will make it come true.
A man who had often felt – or, rather, been told that he was – left behind, Chinese philosopher Guan Zhong prodded against these near-sighted glasses he saw growing popular. “The best investment for one year is to grow grains; the best investment for ten years is to grow trees; the best investment for a lifetime is to educate people.”
When there is no longer a desire for education, no longer any trees to grow, it is no wonder the grains have taken such a heightened importance, for grains will grow into trees, into sprawling, gorgeous leaves, into canopies that inevitably, beautifully, shade our view of the ground, innocent in the way any forgery is.