The Original Prediction Market Was Betting on the Pope

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prediction markets are everywhere nowadays. You can go online and bet on political outcomes, or the weather, or how long Taylor Swift will stay together with Travis Kelce. But prediction markets have a long history, and one of the earliest involved betting on who would be the next pope. In fact, Renaissance Romans gambled on everything from papal elections to whether a particular noblewoman would give birth to a boy or girl. So why was betting such a big thing in 1500s Italy? How did the papal prediction market actually work? And what can it tell us about prediction markets today? We speak to Ryan Isakow, the author of the No Dumb Ideas substack.

Read More: A Live Experiment in Prediction Markets
Prediction Markets Are a Thing Now

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1:00.6	Bloomberg Audio Studios.
1:03.1	Podcasts, Radio, News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
1:22.5	Joe, prediction markets. Yeah, I love them. I know you do. I find them mostly entertaining versus insightful.
1:31.0	And I like looking up things that people are betting on.
1:34.0	So I saw today people are betting on the temperature in New York.
1:37.6	There's one pool for Will Doge and Elon Musk claim there's missing gold at Fort Knox before May.
1:44.5	There's political stuff, obviously, like who will be the next German chancellor.
	...

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