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Books

How we went from mere betting to gaming the world

In his highly disturbing The Perfect Bet, Adam Kucharski reveals how global politics and economics are increasingly dictated by a system of informed gambling

7 May 2016

9:00 AM

7 May 2016

9:00 AM

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Maths are Taking the Luck out of Gambling Adam Kucharski

Profile, pp.272, £12.99, ISBN: 9781781255469

If I prang your car, we can swap insurance details. In the past, it would have been necessary for you to kill me. That’s the great thing about money: it makes liabilities payable and blood feud unnecessary.

Spare a thought, then, for the economist Robin Hanson, whose idea it was, in the years following the attacks on the World Trade Center, to create a market where traders could speculate on political atrocities.

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