My guest this week is my great friend Rajiv Sethi, economist at Barnard and Columbia University and proprietor of the newsletter Imperfect Information. Rajiv is an expert on prediction markets, among other things, so he’s been keeping a close eye on the bets people have been placing on next week’s(!) presidential election. While most election prediction models have Trump up a few points, the former president is the heavy favorite in the major markets. Why are these two different prediction tools diverging so sharply? Rajiv has some ideas, and he shares them here.
But there’s much more to talk about besides the election. Rajiv attended this year’s FIRE conference, and he reports on some of the talks he saw. Roland Fryer delivered the keynote address, which was really more of a Q&A about his, in my view, utterly unjust suspension from Harvard. Rajiv is reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message, and he weighs in here. We talk about what we both see as Coates’s misunderstood humanism and his perspective on “apartheid” in the West Bank. We then get into the markets. As Rajiv points out, election forecasting models are vulnerable to novel events, like a party’s presumptive nominee dropping out of the race. Markets can capture information that escapes models, but they’re vulnerable to manipulation by actors who may seek to affect either the market or the election itself. Rajiv thinks this may account for part of Trump’s outsized lead on markets like Polymarket. And we end the conversation by talking about Rajiv’s family connection to Kamala Harris and the new prominence of Indian Americans in politics.
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0:00 Rajiv’s report from the FIRE conference
4:09 Roland Fryer’s keynote address
14:24 Ta-Nehisi Coates’s humanist universalism
18:23 “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus”
19:48 Rajiv’s reading of Coates’s stand on “apartheid”
32:53 The gap between election forecasting models and prediction markets
37:50 The limits of models and markets
40:57 Rajiv: The markets show us a balance between narratives about the election
45:15 Is one crypto trader manipulating the prediction markets in favor of Trump?
54:10 Rajiv: Prediction markets may have sent early signals about January 6
56:17 Rajiv’s family history with Kamala Harris
58:43 The new prominence of Indian Americans in politics
1:04:05 The axiom of antiessentialism
Recorded October 27, 2024
Links and Readings
Rajiv’s Substack, Imperfect Information
Rajiv’s mother’s Substack, Food and Health
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Lara Bazelon’s 2022 Atlantic essay, “The ACLU Has Lost Its Way”
Glenn’s 2021 conversation with Bazelon
Glenn’s 2023 conversation with Erec Smith
Eugene Volokh on the Hamline University-Prophet Muhammad painting controversy
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, The Message
Coates’s 2010 Atlantic essay, “The Ghost of Bobby Lee”
Ralph Wiley’s book, Dark Witness: When Black People Should Be Sacrificed (Again)
Last week’s TGS debate about The Messsage
Orlando Patterson’s book, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
Glenn’s book, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality
Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
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