r/neoliberal • u/Sine_Fine_Belli NATO • 2d ago

News (US) Obama and Harris publicly rebuke Trump’s second-term actions

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/04/politics/obama-harris-rebuke-trump/index.html
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369

u/DeparturePlenty4446 1d ago

Thanks, Obamna

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u/breadlygames 1d ago edited 1d ago

This, but unironically. IIRC, the Obamas privately supported dropping Biden after the debate disaster, which is good. But they wanted his replacement to be Harris, which brought all of the baggage of Biden's unpopular (deservedly or not) administration. If you looked at the betting markets, you'd have seen she had the worst conditional odds of any Democratic candidate. Gretchen Whitmer had the best conditional odds, by quite a ways, if memory serves. Against Trump, we should have gone with the candidate who had the best odds.

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u/Curious-Caramel-4937 NATO 1d ago

Lost me at betting markets. Probably the worst way to analyze the situation.

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u/breadlygames 1d ago

Pretty weird position to hold for a neoliberal. If people think they're more accurate than the betting markets, they can bet, and if they're right, they improve the market's prediction. If they're wrong they lose money, and thus have less influence over the odds.

If you think their odds are garbage, you should bet, and see how right you are.

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u/captmonkey Henry George 1d ago

Betting markets are skewed by the beliefs of the kind of people who use betting markets.

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u/Curious-Caramel-4937 NATO 1d ago

Regardless of if I am right or wrong in a prediction it doesn't make prediction markets good tools to predict outcomes with. Even if it was right on this election it doesn't actually help the understanding of anything.  Why would you draw conclusions from the beliefs of betting markets users and not from voters with polling?

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u/breadlygames 22h ago edited 18h ago

And just how are you going to get a pure random sample from a voluntary poll? When separate pollsters get different results, how do you weight them? What about poll recency? And how do you factor in predictable changes in public opinion in the lead up to the election? It was only after Harris became the candidate that people could see themselves voting for her. (Conditional polls often produce garbage results because people don't think too hard about hypotheticals.)

Prediction markets already factor all of this in. They also change with the polls, but in an appropriately measured way (e.g. not overreacting to outliers or low quality pollsters). Your suggestion is similar to mine, but lacking in details, and once you fill those details in, it's worse in every way.

Betting odds are literally just another asset class (specifically, they're binary options). For the same reason free markets are the best way to value companies, betting markets are the best way to put a probablity on a partition of events. The only reason you'd argue against this is degenerate gamblers, but many, many degens bet using the stock market too (many degen fund managers and retail investors exist). You're just dead fucking wrong here.