Nothing Succeeds Like Success: Prediction Markets, Democracy and Performativity

The performative logic of economics (I.e. that econometrics are determined by and in the analysis and perception of them, and through their market valuation, so that stock prices, for example, do not and cannot reflect anything like a "true value") has been obvious to anyone who is not so deluded by their own stake in the objective validity of their investments that their narcissistic defenses border on the far side psychosis.  All Soros' theoretical papers add up to this point, and one can assume that it is fairly well understood, in a fairly repressed way, by most economics professors around the world.  It is increasingly obvious that this performative logic is less appropriate as an object of passive, gazing, curiosity, and instead seems to be taking on an inertial quality which would seem to demand an aggressive, furrowed (itself performative) analytic.  In the interest of taking a step in this direction, we should observe how the U.S. presidential campaign polling data is beginning to behave like the prediction markets (like the IEM) that have been established to speculate on these campaigns:  No sooner does a candidate look certain to win, than his poll numbers start going up.  This is why, as these hilariously elderly gentlebloggers point out, the prediction markets have been more accurate than polls in recent years, while polls seem somehow to lag themselves. In this way, the campaign and the speculation regarding the campaign are aligned and both behaving like markets, and in fact not behaving like markets, but as markets, and indeed in a sense as a single market.  While it is by no means necessary that democracy should perform itself according to prediction, it seems now to only destine the future as an ecstasy of prediction: a will to make the likely happen.

The strange apparent difference between this and the stock market used to be the election rhetoric's apocalyptic tone, it's orientation toward the mad decision of an Armageddon on election day, over and against the the general economy, and the stock market in particular, the players in which focused on an infinite expansion of a few particular numbers taken to signify the possibility of potency (think of the cheering of the upness of the up on the trading floor).  No longer.  (if ever?)  These two previously distinct number cults (distinct, and yet recently so united against all justice) have aligned themselves toward armageddon.  Both slave ships turn and lose themselves sailing into a stormy sunset.  The arrogance of imaging that they can destroy themselves after all their crimes is immense.  Democracy knows its own fraudulence and terminal safety in the face of its performativity, does economics?