Found this in the news today.

[Skandranon]

Because it was my belief that the system paid off on events, not the successful prevention of events. How could we gauge the success of a negative event, that of something not happening?

Note the careful distinction in my post between the current system and a "fully-formed" idea futures market. What the Pentagon proposes is far from fully-formed, because the user base is relatively small - it is not large enough to propose comprehensive plans (in which case you would not be gauging the success of a negative event, but rather the success or failure of the preventative plan). With a small user base, all you can do is act as "early-warning", and there are some flaws with an early-warning system, though, I was arguing, not enough to kill it outright. However, with an expansion of the user base, the system transforms from early-warning to a dynamic database of solutions, a virtual consulting resource involving thousands if not hundreds of thousands of experts.

What PAM was, was an embryonic idea-futures market - with significant drawbacks, but with a much higher potential payoff, especially once it transforms into a full solution market. Which is why I emphasized - one has to start somewhere.

With a fully formed market any one problem would be responded to with a number of proposed solutions. Experts, certainly not universal experts, but who contain expertise in various areas, would then comment. For example, a plan to democratize Iraq could receive input from an advertising specialist, an Islamic cleric, a sociologist, and a political scientist, then modified by engineers or military experts or people with experience in desert regions for feasibility. None of them could propose the plan on their own, but what the market does is organize their expertise in such a way that what areas they do know well are utilized to their full potential. With thousands more experts working on alternative plans or laying money on plans they support (or laying money against plans that they believe will fail), the solutions that emerge as strongly supported are the most likely to succeed, having been designed by experts and supported strongly by experts in one of the most concrete ways possible - with money.