Killing a fairy tale

James Surowiecki - Wisdom of Crowds - pp.81

Senator Wyden dismissed PAM ["Policy Analysis Market"] as a "fairy tale" and suggested that DARPA would be better off putting its money into "real world" intelligence. But the dichotomy was a false one. No one suggested replacing traditional intelligence gathering with a market. PAM was intended to be simply another way of collecting information. And in any case, if PAM had, in fact, been a "fairy tale," we would have known it soon enough. Killing the project ensured only that we would have no idea whether decision markets might have something to add to our current intelligence efforts. The hostility toward PAM, in any case, had little to do with how effective it would or would not be.