The Big Bet

A dazzling exploration of the phenomenon of prediction betting markets that asks: what happens when democracy becomes another commodity? For many, Donald Trump’s decisive election victory over Kamala Harris in 2024 was a shock. Traditional polls had the race on a razor’s edge. But, for those with eyes on prediction betting markets, a very different story was being told. In recent years, prediction markets have swept the world, fundamentally changing the nature of the gambling market, and making their youthful pioneers billionaires. Posed as binary ‘Yes/No’ questions about future events, prediction bets allow any difference of opinion – whether on politics, wars, assassinations or popular culture – to be financialised. But are these markets really a new phenomenon? What does it mean when markets get closer to the truth than the institutions we built to protect us? And what happens when those tasked with safeguarding democracy possess financial stakes in its volatility? From Renaissance Rome, where merchants wagered on papal conclaves, through London coffee house gossip during the Napoleonic Wars, to the Pentagon’s ill-fated terrorism futures exchange, The Big Bet describes the full five-hundred-year arc of a permissive regime which no one designed and no one voted for. Drawing on deep expertise, Michael Auerbach examines how these markets are changing our world, and what they mean for the future of our democratic self-governance. Because they are not an anomaly – they are the logical endpoint of a society that has applied market capitalism to every aspect of life. And in a world when everything is a wager and nothing is off limits, knowing where the chips will fall matters more than ever.