I've been trying to decide what I think of Bryan Caplan's argument that pundits should place public bets on their predictions. It imposes accountability through the threat pubic humiliation, and you can see the upside: Predictions are currently offered without any fear that their accuracy will be systematically recorded. Dedicated debunkers occasionally comb the archives to ferret out embarrassing quotes, but both sides ignore such efforts because they're conducted with the intent to embarrass rather than to impartially check the speaker's average. But if there was a more credible mechanism for accountability that offered as much chance for reward as humiliation -- bets, say, or a media watch organization that simply tallied testable predictions and released the results a year later -- it would be harder to dismiss the results.Would that be good? I'm not sure. Tyler Cowen thinks it's a bad idea. It would make for more careful punditry. But it would also make for less provocative punditry as the players began to fear being wrong. You might get fewer false ideas but also fewer brilliant ones. What do you think? A PUNDIT ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT?
I've been trying to decide what I think of Bryan Caplan's argument that pundits should place public bets on their predictions. It imposes accountability through the threat pubic humiliation, and you can see the upside: Predictions are currently offered without any fear that their accuracy will be systematically recorded. Dedicated debunkers occasionally comb the archives to ferret out embarrassing quotes, but both sides ignore such efforts because they're conducted with the intent to embarrass rather than to impartially check the speaker's average. But if there was a more credible mechanism for accountability that offered as much chance for reward as humiliation -- bets, say, or a media watch organization that simply tallied testable predictions and released the results a year later -- it would be harder to dismiss the results.Would that be good? I'm not sure. Tyler Cowen thinks it's a bad idea. It would make for more careful punditry. But it would also make for less provocative punditry as the players began to fear being wrong. You might get fewer false ideas but also fewer brilliant ones. What do you think? 
