@Daojoan I'm not sure that there's necessarily any overlap between genuinely civic-minded policy-makers (facing the epistemic gap you're talking about) and market-driven forces. TBH, I think that the US has basically stopped holding anything sacred for quite some time, so it's been in decay for as long as that. I don't see this new iteration of prediction markets is a sign of a tipping point... it's just another sign in a long line of grotesqueries.

A couple of things that come to mind... Nietzsche’s observation that very few individuals are insane, whereas most societies fit that bill. The other is the film "Ikiru" and how the civil servant has to come to an awakening to the indifference the state has to the horrible conditions that its people have to live in, and how he himself has been part of that self-perpetuating machine.

@Daojoan Insightful piece

The idea that every uncertainty can become a market that creates a probability has had some economists drooling but it has been seen in practice in the credit derivatives market that it doesn't work: there is simply not enough interest for most individual company contracts, so they are simply creating a market manipulation mechanism.

Arguably derivative contracts are least bad when there is already a spot market: society has already financialized the underlying good.

@Daojoan "People blame the institutions for their inefficiency, without noticing that the efficiency of the replacements is achieved by discarding the functions that the institutions existed to provide."