Cool. I'm guessing you liked the book? I picked up a copy just yesterday, on the off chance that it would tie in with some of my other historical interests.

Cool. I'm guessing you liked the book? I picked up a copy just yesterday, on the off chance that it would tie in with some of my other historical interests. Does it mention the Fuggers? At any rate, there is a better way to support the people who do work like this, although the mechanism is peripheral and counterintuitive. A parallel example might be to say that stock markets are important innovations in the field of public health, because they fund corporations that can aggregate and compartmentalize the risk of new drug discovery. So without beating any farther around the bush: prediction markets (like Intrade) could monetize huge chunks of information that are currently only interesting to theoreticians, if they were capitalized at the level of today's stock or commodities markets. If speculators were laying billion-dollar bets on, say, whether the US would invade Iraq in 2002 [1], the opinions of prominent historians and political scientists who study the Gulf region would be much more explicitly in demand. Such people would still have to publish to get prominent (so that the benefits of an open academic environment would still accrue to the public), and there would be additional pressure to produce falsifiable predictions instead of... whatever it is that gets produced now. Here's a short intro for people who don't like math, signed by a veritable Who's Who of economics and public policy: http://hanson.gmu.edu/PromisePredMkt.pdf http://hanson.gmu.edu/PromisePredMkt.pdf Here's a more technical introduction by the guy who came up with the idea. (He focuses on maximizing GDP instead of secondary benefits): http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf [1] It ought to be obvious why arbitrageurs would want to do this. I picked an old and inflammatory example to emphasize how many current political disagreements are at root questions of fact, about which people ought to be able to agree eventually...