Ron Wyden

Ron Wyden appears as a leading political opponent of the proposed Policy Analysis Market (PAM), a public prediction market intended to forecast events in the Middle East and elsewhere. His objections centered not only on whether the project would work, but on whether it was morally acceptable to let people profit from wagers on possible catastrophes. The book contrasts that condemnation with the potential value of using markets to gather information that intelligence agencies might otherwise miss.

Opposition to the Policy Analysis Market

In the summer of 2003, PAM became the focus of intense criticism. Wyden and Senator Byron Dorgan led the effort to kill the proposal, denouncing it as “harebrained,” “offensive,” and “useless.” The book reports that the public response was similarly appalled among those who heard about the project before it was canceled. Their opposition helped end a proposal that would have opened a forecasting market to members of the public.

Wyden also dismissed PAM as a “fairy tale,” arguing that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency would be better off spending its money on “real world” intelligence. The book disputes this framing: PAM was not proposed as a replacement for traditional intelligence gathering, but as an additional way to collect information. Because the project was canceled, there was no way to find out whether decision markets could contribute to existing intelligence efforts.

The ethical dispute over forecasting

The central objection the book attributes to Wyden and Dorgan was moral: they considered it offensive and wrong to wager on potential catastrophes. The author acknowledges the visceral discomfort of betting on an assassination attempt, but argues that government analysts already assess questions of comparable gravity, including the stability of Jordan’s government, the possibility that the House of Saud might fall, and who would lead the Palestinian Authority in 2005. If government agencies may ask such questions in pursuit of intelligence, the book contends, asking them outside government is not inherently immoral.

The argument also places PAM alongside other paid forms of information gathering. Intelligence analysts are paid to forecast catastrophes, and informants may be paid for valuable information. Life insurance likewise relies on financial wagers about when people will die. These comparisons do not erase the discomfort of profiting from predictions of disaster; instead, they frame it as a tension between moral distaste and the possible public benefit of more accurate information.

What the proposal might have added

The book presents public participation as a potential strength of PAM. A market open beyond government agencies could have encouraged people whom the intelligence community might not normally hear from—including people deterred by patriotism, fear, or resentment—to contribute what they knew about conditions in the Middle East. Traders, the author argues, would have had an incentive to make accurate predictions rather than tailor their assessments to satisfy a supervisor, agency, or political climate.

In this account, Wyden’s opposition helped preserve the barriers to information aggregation that the proposed market might have challenged. The author’s conclusion is that rejecting PAM prevented a test of whether the market could make American intelligence stronger. If it could have done so, the book argues, moral discomfort alone would not have justified refusing to use it.