The Atlantic has seen the future, and they hate it. That’s to judge by recent headlines: “A Technology for a Low-Trust Society,” “Prediction Markets and the ‘Suckerification’ Crisis,” “America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster,” “The Polymarket Bets on Maduro Are a Warning,” “The Company Making a Mockery of State Gambling Bans.” Wow. Prediction markets are horrible!

Always be meta-ing. Horror sells. The Atlantic just drove up its eyeballs and profits through Jim Harper links!

The headline that really caught my eye was “Polymarket Is Going to Get Someone Killed.” That’s not what the article actually says. Headline writers sometimes sprinkle blood on more reserved content. Horror sells.

The argument is this: There have been a few big bets placed on prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi ahead of military actions. It’s safe to assume that someone in the know got ahead of the news and made a profit.

The danger is obvious. If US military actions are at greater risk from leaks due to prediction markets, prediction markets are a threat. Ferlinghetti on Goya was child’s play.

But a few things shave down on the risk-of-carnage argument. One is to recognize that leaks through prediction markets threaten military organizations on both sides in any conflict. The less well-regimented military is more likely to spring leaks, all else being equal, when there are cold, hard rials on offer.

(Well, rials are not hard money, but you know what I mean.)

The United States military is evidently not behind on using prediction markets to advantage. Should prediction markets kill someone, it may well be on the other side.

More broadly, the metaphorical deadliness of prediction markets is muted by recognizing that secrecy in general is a strategic weakness. That has been apparent since at least the Wikileaks fiasco. The practice of secrecy itself creates risks. When leaks happen, prediction markets are the messenger. Would you rather not know that your military has leakers? Always be meta-ing.

Thwarting prediction markets would seem to protect large, bureaucratic organizations—Big [Fill-in-the-Blanks] both public and private. The Atlantic’s horror stream seems to line up on the side of status quo power arrangements against a—yes—very uncomfortable influence that would tend to flatten power.

With the forces of keep-things-the-same likely to align against my preferred different/better, I’ve been thinking about what a prediction market actually is. The Atlantic’s killer-markets piece calls “prediction markets” a “sanitized, industry-favored term,” without offering a different one.

When social media platforms were in the sights, I did some thinking on that, too. It’s muh job.

The internet and social media are strange but real descendants of the printing press, disembodied and given to everyone to use as much as they want. Social media companies aggregate and augment this mass exercise of expression.

Prediction markets seem to be the internet descendant of three things: gambling, investing, and journalism.

“Putting your money where your mouth is” used to be restricted to one-off bets with friends. Now everyone can bet with everyone. Those who know better what is going on in the world can earn substantial (and taxable) profits.

The best investing has always been about knowing more others in financial markets and putting money behind such knowledge—even though that game is morally suspect by some lights. But investing allocates capital to the most productive firms and grows economies, even for Puritans.

Investing blends with journalism—muckraking, even!—in enterprises like Hindenburg Research, the now-shuttered investment firm that would expose corporate wrongdoing after betting against bad companies in the markets. There are successors to Hindenburg out there.

There’s a big, important externality from all of this: better information for everyone. How much would you pay for a congressional staffer to leak her boss’s bribe-taking?

My research hasn’t turned up solid proof that Americans were a nation of gamblers on events. But games of chance? Oh yes—even as Revolutionary-War era gambler-founders lamented the plebes doing it.

There is an argument (due more research) that the mass-communicative content of prediction markets may bring them within “the freedom of speech” and thus the shelter of the First Amendment. As a policy matter, there seems much to be gained from prediction markets. Their costs, such as “problem gambling” and market manipulation, must be controlled.

I anticipate gaining from my experiential research on these topics. There are a couple of markets on whether President Trump will be impeached and when. The market on impeachment by the end of 2026 seems like an opportunity to add to the store of human knowledge while taking something from gulls who think a Republican House of Representatives will impeach the president or give way to Democratic leadership in the current calendar year.

Don’t kill the messenger! You’ll make the Atlantic headline ring true.