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Social media has broken US politics. Political polarization between Democrats and Republicans has been increasing for decades (and has many causes), but cable news, internet media, and increasingly algorithm-based social media have shifted voter attention and interest towards issues that are engaging and tribal but unimportant.
As a few examples: the Claudine Gay Harvard President Resignation Scandal generated dozens of articles, but it’s a trivial story on the national stage. A sampling of top political stories from NPR includes the George Santos expulsion, Kevin McCarthy resignation (both quite unimportant) as well as the wars in Israel and Ukraine (which are important, but not in voters’ top 10 issues: see ranking of problems facing America, with “international terrorism” and “climate change” as a proxy for how much Americans care about global issues).
the issues on voters’ minds as of mid-2023. source: pew research center
Put simply: Voting in the United States is now usually an act of affirming self-identity and signaling tribal affiliation. It may have always been like that, but incentives have evidently shifted in the last 15 years so that when voters consume news and vote, the result is a White House, Congress, and Supreme Court that few Americans approve of, as well as eroding trust in media and other institutions.
Most of us have heard of the stock market, where people earn money from betting correctly on the value of corporations. There’re also commodities markets, where farmers and financiers can bet on the future price of wheat and oil.
A prediction market is a market to predict whether any future event will happen. At any point in time, it has a probability of the event happening, some traders who hold YES shares (and will be paid if it happens), and others who hold NO shares (and will be paid if it doesn’t). Check out Manifold’s homepage to get a sense of the markets that are trending now.
Manifold Markets is a play-money (not cash, not real money, not crypto) prediction market platform. That means new users get M$500, our in-game currency, and they can pay $1 USD to get M$100 more if they want, but they can’t cash out. (they can direct Manifold to donate their winnings to charity, if they want). It might be surprising that anyone would care about a fake money platform, but 10,000 people already use Manifold every month. Think of it like Reddit karma, Twitter followers, or academic citations — just because a number doesn’t have cash value, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter to people.
Not only do people use it, but it works: Manifold’s play-money markets are as good at predicting the future as real-money ones, and were second to 538 (which is no longer helmed by Nate Silver) at predicting 2022 Senate results.
Learn more about Manifold here.