Description

‘Michael Auerbach has one of the most original minds I’ve ever encountered . . . This is a dazzling and entertaining book . . . But it is also an urgent warning’ PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, author of Empire of Pain

A brilliant exploration of the phenomenon of prediction markets that asks: what happens when democracy becomes another commodity?

Prediction markets are sweeping the world, fundamentally changing the nature of gambling – and the very ways in which we attempt to divine the future.

Posed as binary ‘Yes/No’ questions about future events, prediction markets allow any difference of opinion – whether on pop culture or politics, wars or assassinations – to be financialised. A regulatory minefield with moral implications that divide nations, governments and bettors, they have proved as effective at accurately predicting the timing of missile strikes as they have at calling the outcomes of elections.

But are these markets really a new phenomenon? And what does it mean when those tasked with safeguarding democracy hold financial stakes in its volatility?

From Renaissance Rome, where merchants wagered on papal conclaves, through nineteenth-century London’s wartime coffee house gossip, to the Pentagon’s ill-fated terrorism futures exchange and blockchain-based betting on Polymarket today, The Big Bet tells the gripping five-hundred-year story of a permissive regime that 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 where democracy becomes just another commodity to be priced and traded. Because prediction markets 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 where everything is a wager and nothing is off limits, knowing where the chips will fall matters more than ever.

Publisher Review

Michael Auerbach has one of the most original minds I've ever encountered - and an uncanny instinct for what's coming next. In THE BIG BET, he explores the past, present, and future of the prediction market, a phenomenon that is reshaping our world in real time, and in startling ways. This is a dazzling and entertaining book, full of keen insights and arresting anecdotes. But it is also an urgent warning about what we might gamble away if we become a society that wagers on everything. Democracy itself is at stake. -- PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, author of London Falling This is a forensic, urgent and barely-credible expose of a world that prices everything but values nothing. I was enthralled and appalled by it, and I bet you will be too. It's superb. -- OLIVER BULLOUGH, author of Moneyland Every generation or so, the world experiences a moment where one can see exactly where the bus is headed and nobody will touch the wheel. This is one of those moments. Michael Auerbach has written the most honest account of where prediction markets are taking us. The Big Bet is brilliant, troubling, and almost impossible to put down. -- SCOTT GALLOWAY, New York Times bestselling author of The Algebra of Wealth and Notes on Being a Man Will The Big Bet become essential reading on prediction markets? This market resolved to YES. Michael Auerbach's book is a history lesson and an overview of the state of play, but also a forewarning of a future rife with insider trading and corruption. I cleaned up. -- MATT STONE, co-creator of South Park