Why do we need to allow prediction markets like this at all? It's just gambling dressed up as though it was a stock market. It's just horse racing at a massive scale... except for the hyperstition factor of it actually influencing world events. At least one can pretend, with the regular stock market, that one is investing in the success of a company; though we all know we're a long way from that.

There seems to be no prosocial reason for this whatsoever.

Polymarket and Kalshi have just been declared gambling under New Zealand law, and therefore 'investing' in them is now illegal for New Zealanders. Both companies have been ordered to stop providing services to New Zealanders [0]

0. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/587993/why-betting-on-to...

No doubt. Sports betting too. I’m a curmudgeon but we should completely unwind to the pre-lottery days when organized gambling was simply not legal.

My understanding is the original value these markets create is the ability to hedge risk.

If you're worried an event may impact you materially (like cat 5 hurricane in Florida), then you can place a bet that the event will happen, thus hedging some risk if it does happen.

Insurance companies can participate in these products for the same reasons.

Or if you need to hedge against an event that isn't insurable. For example, if you are a high level democrat party leader and you will lose your job if a republican wins, you might take a bet to hedge your risk if your party looses the next cycle.

A good reason to allow it is because people want to do it and it is as relatively harmful as many other normative human behaviors.. A better reason is that it provides a means of measure real attitudes and opinions. The revealed prices afforded by prediction markets is interesting at the least, and possibly the best source of information for many of topics.

When i see those ads I legit thought it required gaming licenses. Just wow, apparently you can get away with gaming as long as it doesn't have the label.

There are prediction markets on a number of questions (most prominently about politics) where people have good reasons besides entertainment value to want to know the answers.

I agree that it's disappointing that so much of it has ended up being sports betting, and would be in favor of targeted regulations to deemphasize that in favor of more socially useful topics.

Can I just get Joe Camel and smoking sections back please?

Every gas station in this traditional blue law state has beer and slot machines now!

Bring back Joe Camel!!

I’ll admit that in my younger days, reading Bryan Caplan and Nassim Taleb, I got caught up in the starry-eyed fantasizing about prediction markets that was (and still is) widespread in the libertarian corners of the internet. Force people to put their money where their mouth is! Combining the wisdom of crowds with Superforecasters will lead to vastly improved decision-making! Prediction markets will be so accurate eventually we’ll run the government on them! It sounds so good on paper.

The reality has been rather different. It’s just another form of gambling that’s wrecking people’s lives, and it's not obvious to me that they’re even very good at forecasting, which might help make up for it (the absurdly overpriced markets re: “is LK-99 a room-temperature superconductor” were one example). It was an interesting hypothesis but a failed experiment: shut it down and move on.