DARPA, a Pentagon department, has come up with a new idea to help the US Government predict what will happen in the Middle East. That idea is The Policy Analysis Market (link now defunct - see addendum below).

The basic concept is the trading of "futures contracts" which are based on whether or not certain events occur, and ostensibly is intended as an intelligence gathering tool (you have to feel sorry for the US Government: after all, intelligence isn't their strong point, bless them, so one can hardly blame them for clutching at such ridiculous straws). In lay terms, it's a federal bookmaker with market-led odds on political and terrorist developments.

You could imagine someone in a brainstorm session saying, 'how about this,' and everyone thinking for a couple of seconds and smiling - it's a nice cross-breed of different techniques. But it just seems so amazingly crass and full of holes that it would take a room full of unscrupulous, money-craving, right-wing warmongers to fail to shoot it down in flames.

Oh hang on.

The holes in the theory mean it kind of falls into the engineer's trap, of the tests you're trying to perform having an effect on the object or system you're trying to measure. It would be foolish to assume that there won't be any big financial players in the PAM trader list, so we can probably take it as read that there'd be enough money around to make it worth people's while if the events under consideration were to come to pass. Money makes people 'do stuff' - it certainly makes Americans do stuff - so with an extensive tapestry of vested interests and major payouts to be had, it's hard to see how the PAM will act as a preventative measure.

The American culture is, and always has been, centred around money uber alles, and even a mild cynic would fail to believe that US interests were hoping to make a dollar or two out of "counter"-terrorism and Middle Eastern invasions. Yet, just as the US is powerful enough to be unabashed about its aim of World domination, so it now seems willing to tie money directly to political, military and terrorist events, and to declare its unyielding faith in market forces as if doing so was the Eleventh Commandment that Moses forgot to tell everyone about.

Is this the thin end of the wedge though? The mind boggles. After all, we've had the 'most wanted' playing cards, and now the betting shop.

I confidently predict Al-Qluedo, where every time you play, "it was bin Laden, in New York, with the aeroplanes." Or maybe Republican Monopoly, where instead of London streets you buy up Middle Eastern countries, and once you've built four branches of McDonalds in each you can open a branch of K-Mart.

Welcome to the world today. Future world history will be bought and sold with Monopoly money. Politics is dead, long live The Global Casino.

Addendum - 31.07.03

As reported by The Register, the PAM website is no more. Some form of sense may have prevailed. Or maybe not. I'm sure we'll see some form of mind-boggling lunacy from a US federal agency before too long.