The Siren Song of Sustainability: The Theocratic Trifecta's Third Leg!

    You might know, by now, of my views on ESG, which I have described as an empty acronym, born in sanctimony, nurtured in hypocrisy and sold with sophistry. My voyage with ESG began with curiosity in my 2019 exploration of what it purported to measure, turned to cynicism as the answers to the Cui Bono (who benefits) question became clear and has curdled into something close to contempt, as ESG advocates rewrote history and retroactively changed their measurements in recent years. Late last year, I looked at impact investing, as a subset of ESG investing, and chronicled the trillions put into fighting climate change, and the absence of impact from that spending. Sometime before these assessments, I also looked at the notion of stakeholder wealth maximization as an idea that only corporate lawyers and strategists would love, and argued that there is a reason, in conventional businesses to stay focused on shareholders. With each of these topics (ESG, impact investing, stakeholder wealth maximization), the response that I got from some of the strongest defenders was that "sustainability" is the ultimate end game, and that the fault has been in execution (in ESG and impact investing), and not in the core idea.  

    I was curious about what sets sustainability apart from the critiqued ideas, as well as skeptical, since the cast of characters (individual and entities) in the sustainability sales pitch seems much the same as for the ESG and impact investing sales pitches.  In critiquing sustainability, I may be swimming against the tide, but less so than I was five years ago, when I first wrote about these issues. In fact, in my first post on ESG, I confessed that I risked being labeled as a "moral troglodyte" for my views, and I am sure that my subsequent posts have made that a reality, but I have a thick skin. This post on sustainability will, if it is read, draw withering scorn from the righteous, and take me off their party invite list, but I don't like parties anyway.

Sustainability: The What, the Why and the Who?

    I have been in business and markets for more than four decades, and while sustainability as an end game has existed through that period, but much of that time, it was in the context of the planet, not for businesses. It is in the last two decades that corporate sustainability has become a term that you see in academic and business circles, albeit with definitions that vary across users. Before we look at how those definitions have evolved, it is instructive to start with three measures of sustainability, measuring (in my view) very different things:

• Planet sustainability, measuring how our actions, as consumers and businesses, affect the planet, and our collective welfare and well being. This, of course, covers everything from climate change to health care to income inequality.
• Product sustainability, measuring how long a product or service from a business can be used effectively, before becoming useless or waste. In a throw-away world, where planned obsolescence seems to be built into every product or service, there are consumers and governments who care about product sustainability, albeit for different reasons.
• Business or corporate sustainability, measuring the life of a business or company, and actions that can extend or constrict that life. 

There are corporate sustainability advocates who will argue that it covers all of the above, and that a business that wants to increase its sustainability has to make more sustainable products, and that doing so will improve planet sustainability. That may be true, in some cases, but in many, there will be conflicts. A company that makes shaving razors may be able to create razor blades that stay sharp forever, and need no replacement, but that increased product sustainability may crimp corporate sustainability. In the same vein, there may be some companies (and you can let your priors guide you in naming them), whose very existence puts the planet at risk, and if planet sustainability is the end game, the best thing that can happen is for these companies to cease to exist. 

    

    Which of these measures of sustainability lies at the heart of corporate sustainability, as practiced today? To get the answers, I looked at a variety of players in the sustainability game, and will use their own words in the description, lest I be accused of taking them out of context:

• Business schools around the world have discovered that sustainability classes not only draw well, and improve their rankings (especially with the Financial Times, which seems to have a fetish with the concept), but are also money makers when constructed as executive classes. NYU, the institution that I teach at, has an executive corporate sustainability course, with certification costing $2,200, but I will quote the Vanderbilt University course description instead, where for a $3,000 price tag, you can get a certificate in corporate sustainability, which is described as " a holistic approach to conducting business while achieving long-term environmental, social, and economic sustainability." 
• Academia: I read through seminal and impactful (as academics, we are fond of both words, with the latter measured in citations) papers on corporate sustainability, to examine how they defined and measured sustainability. A 2003 paper on corporate sustainability describes it as recognizing that "corporate growth and profitability are important, it also requires the corporation to pursue societal goals, specifically those relating to sustainable development — environmental protection, social justice and equity, and economic development." In the last two decades, it is estimated that there have been more than twelve thousand articles published on corporate sustainability, and while the definition has remained resilient, it has developed offshoots and variants.
• Corporate/Business: Companies, around the world, were quick to jump onto the sustainability bandwagon, and sustainability (or something to that effect) is part of many corporate mission statements. The Hartford, a US insurance company, describes corporate sustainability as centered "around developing business strategies and solutions to serve the needs of our stakeholders, while embracing the necessary innovation and foresight to ensure we are able to meet those needs in the decades to come."
• Governments: Governments have also joined the party, and the EU has been the frontrunner, and its definition of corporate sustainability as "integrating social, environmental, ethical, consumer, and human rights concerns into their business strategy and operations" has become the basis for both disclosure and regulatory actions. The Canadian government has used to EU model to create a corporate sustainability reporting directive, requiring companies to report on and spend more on a host on environmental, social and governance indicators. 

I am willing to be convinced otherwise, but all of these definitions seem to be centered around planet sustainability, with varying motivations for why businesses should act on that front, from clean consciences (it is the right thing to do) to being "good for business" (if you do it, you will become more profitable and valuable).

    While corporate sustainability has taken center stage in the last two decades, it is part of a discussion about the social responsibilities of businesses that has been around for centuries. From Adam Smith's description of economics as the "gospel of mammon" in the 1700s to Milton Friedman's full-throated defense of business in the 1970s, it can be argued that almost every debate about businesses has included discussions of what they should do for society, beyond just following the law. That said, corporate sustainability (and its offshoots) have clearly taken a more central role in business  than ever before, and one manifestation is in the rise of "corporate sustainability officers" (CSOs) at many large companies. A PwC survey of 1640 companies in 62 countries, in 2022, found that the number of companies with CSOs tripled in 2021, with about 30% of all companies having someone in that position. A Conference Board survey of hundred sustainability leaders (take the sample bias into account) of the state of corporate sustainability pointed to the expectation that sustainability teams at companies would continue to grow over time. Finally, going back to academia, an indicator of the buzz in buzzwords, a survey paper in 2022 noted the rise in the number of corporate-sustainability related articles in recent years, as well as documenting their focus:

Burbano, Delma and Cobo (2022)

Note that much of the surge in articles came from ESG, which at least for the bulk of this period marched in lockstep with sustainability. Reflecting that twinning, many of the papers on corporate sustainability, just like the papers on ESG, were framed as sustainability being not just good for society but also good for the companies that adopted them. 

    I will admit that I have no idea what a CSO is or does, but I did get a chance to find out for myself, when I was invited to give a talk to the CSOs of fifty large companies. I started that session with a  question, born entirely out of curiosity, to the audience of what they did, at their respective organizations. After about twenty minutes of discussion, it was very clear that there was no consensus answer. In fact, some were as in the dark, as I was, about a CSO's responsibilities and role, and among the many and sometimes convoluted and contradictory answers I heard, here was my categorization of potential CSO roles:

1. CSO as Yoda: Some of the CSOs described their role as providing vision and guidance to the companies they worked at, about the societal effects of their actions, and doing so with a long term perspective. In short, even though they did not make this explicit, they were projecting that they had the training and foresight on how the company and society would evolve over time, and advice the company on the actions that it would need to take to match that evolution. I was tempted, though I restrained myself, to ask what training they had to be such receptacles of wisdom, since a degree or certification in sustainability clearly would not do the trick. I did dig into Star Wars lore, where it is estimated that it takes a decade or two of intense training to become a Jedi, and left open the possibility that there may be an institution somewhere that is turning out sustainability jedis.
2. CSO as Jiminy Cricket: I am a fan of Disney movies, and Pinocchio, while not one of the best known, remains one of my favorites. If you have watched the movie, Jiminy Cricket is the character that sits on Pinocchio's shoulder and acts as his conscience, and for some of the CSOs in the audience, that seemed to be the template, i.e., to act as corporate consciences, reminding the companies that they work for, of the social effects of their actions. The problem, of course, is that like the Jiminy Cricket in the movie, they get tagged as relentless scolds, usually get ignored, and get little glory, even when proved right. 
3. CSO as PR Genius: There were a few CSOs who were open about the fact that they were effectively marketing fronts for companies, with the job of taking actions that could not remotely be argued as being good for the planet and selling them as such. I am not sure whether Unilever's CSO was involved in the process, but the company's push to have each of its four hundred brands have a social or environmental purpose would have fallen into this realm. 
4. CSO as Embalmer: Finally, there were some CSOs who argued that it was their job to ensure that the company would live longer, perhaps even forever. If you are familiar with my work on corporate life cycles, I believe that not much good comes from companies surviving as “walking dead” entities, but in a world where survival at any cost is viewed as success, it is a by product. 

Here are the roles in table form, with the training that would prepare you best for each one:

I am sure that I am missing some of the nuance in sustainability, but if so, remember that nuance does not survive well in business contexts, where a version of Gresham's law is at work, with the worst motives driving out the best.

Sustainability and ESG

    In the last two or three years, corporate sustainability advocates have tried to distance themselves from ESG, arguing that the faults of ESG are of its own doing, and came from ignoring sustainability lessons. I am sorry, but I don't buy it. If ESG did not exist, sustainability would have had to invent it, because much of the growth in sustainability as a money-maker has come from its ESG arm. As I see it, ESG took the abstractions of corporate sustainability and converted them into a score, and it was that much maligned scoring mechanism that caused a surge of adoptions both in corporate boardrooms and among the investment community. It is worth noting that both ESG and sustainability draw their rationale from stakeholder wealth maximization, with the core thesis being that businesses should be run for the benefit of all stakeholders, rather than “just” for shareholders. It is in this context that I used the "theocratic trifecta" to describe how ESG, sustainability and stakeholder wealth are linked, and have been marketed. 

I use the word “theocratic” deliberately, since like theocrats in every domain, some in the sustainability space believe that they own the high ground on virtue, and view dissent as almost sacrilegious. 

    While a scoring mechanism, by itself, can be viewed as having a good purpose, i.e., to create a measure of how much a company is moving towards it sustainability goals, and to hold it accountable, it creates natural consequences that come with all scoring mechanisms:

• Measurers claiming to be objective arbiters, when the truth is that all scores require subjective judgments about what comprises goodness, and the consequences for business profitability and value.
• Businesses that start to understand the scoring process and factors, and then game the scoring systems to improve their scores. Greenwashing is a feature of these scoring systems, not a bug, and the more you try to refine the scoring, the more sophisticated the gaming will become.
• Advocates wringing their hands about the gaming, and arguing that the answer is more detailed definitions of things that defy definition, not recognizing (or perhaps not caring) that this just feeds the cycle and creates even more gaming.

With ESG, we have seen this process play out in destructive ways, with the scoring services (Sustainalytics, S&P, Refinitiv) using not only different criteria to come up with scores, but also changing those criteria in time and companies with the most resources to do so gaming those scoring systems to deliver better ESG scores. Accountants and regulators have added to the mix, by increasing disclosure requirements on almost every aspect of ESG, with little or no tangible benefits to show in terms of actual change.

   Taking a step back and looking at ESG and sustainability as concepts, they share many of the same characteristics:

1. They are opaque: Both ESG and sustainability are opaque to the point of obfuscation, perhaps because it serves the interests of advocates, who can then market them in whatever form they want to. To the pushback from defenders that the details are being nailed down or that there are new standards in place or coming, the argument runs hollow because the end game seems to keep changing. With ESG, for instance, the end game when it was initiated was making the world a better place (doing good), which evolved to generating alpha (excess returns for investors), on to being a risk measure before converting on a disclosure requirement. Defenders argue that there will be convergence driven by tighter definitions from regulators and rule makers, and the EU, in particular, has been in the lead on this front, putting out a Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) in 2022,  outlining economic activities that contribute to meeting the EU’s environmental objectives. While ESG advocates may be right about convergence, looking to the the bureaucracy in Brussels to have the good sense (on economics and sustainability) to get this right is analogous to asking a long-time vegan where you can get the best steak in town. 
2. They are rooted in virtue: While some of the advocates for ESG and sustainability have now steered away from goodness as an argument for their use, almost every debate about the two topics eventually ends up with advocates claiming to be on the side of good, with critics consigned to the dark side. 
3. Disclosures, over actions:  The path for purpose-driven concepts (sustainability, ESG) seems to follow a familiar arc. They start with the endgame of making the world a better place, are marketed with the pitch that purpose and profits go together (the original sin) and when the lie is exposed, are repackaged as being about disclosures that can be used by consumers and investors to make informed judgments. Both ESG and sustainability have traversed this path, and both seem to be approaching the "it's all about disclosure" phase of the cycle. While that seems like a reasonable outcome, since almost everyone is in favor of more information, there are two downsides to this disclosure drive. The first is that disclosure can become not just a substitute for acting, but an impediment to the change that makes a difference. The second is that as disclosures become more extensive, there is a tipping point, especially as the consequential disclosures are mixed in with minor ones, where users start ignoring the disclosure, effectively removing their information value. 
4. Underplay or ignore sacrifice: Of all the mistakes, the biggest one made in the sales pitch for ESG and sustainability was that you could eat your cake, and have it too. Companies were told that being sustainable would make them more profitable and valuable, investors were sold on the notion that investing in good companies would deliver higher or extra returns and consumers were informed that they could make sustainable choices, with little or no additional cost. The truth is that sustainability will be costly to businesses, investors, and consumers, and why should that surprise us? Through history, being good has always required sacrifice, and it was always hubris to argue that you could upend that history, with ESG and sustainability.

Notwithstanding the money, time and resources that have been poured into ESG and sustainability, there is little in terms of real change on any of the societal or climate problems that they purport to want to change. 

Can sustainability be saved?

    

    I may be a moral troglodyte, because of my views on ESG, sustainability and all things good, but we have a shared interest in making the world a better place, and that leads to  the question of whether corporate sustainability, or at least the mission that it espouses, can be salvaged. I believe that there is a path forward, but it requires steps that many sustainability purists may find anathema:

1. Be clear eyed about what can be achieved at the business level: There is truth to the Milton Friedman adage that the business of business is business, not filling in for social needs or catering to non-business interests. It is true that there are actions that businesses take that can create costs to society, and even if the law does not require it, it behooves us to get businesses to behave better, without asking them to do what governments and regulators should be doing.  For business sustainability to deliver results, that line between business and government action has to be made clearer, and adhered to in practice.
2. Open about the costs to businesses of meeting sustainability goals: Be real about the sacrifices in profitability and value that will be needed for a company to do what's good for society. To the extent that in a publicly traded company, it is not the managers, but one of the stakeholders (shareholders, bondholders, employees or customer), who bear this cost, you need buy in from them, if the sustainability actions are voluntary. For companies that are well managed and have done well for their stakeholders, the sacrifice may be easier to sell, but for badly managed businesses, it will be, and should be, a steeper hill to climb. To the extent that corporate executives and fund managers choose to create costs for others (shareholders in a company, investors in a fund), without their buy in, there is clearly a violation of fiduciary duty that will and should leave them exposed to legal consequences.
3. Clear about who bears these costs: I was recently asked to give testimony to a Canadian parliamentary committee that was considering ways of getting banks to contribute to fighting climate change (by lending less to fossil fuel companies and more to green energy firms), and much of what I heard from committee members and the other experts was about how banks would bear the costs. The truth is that when a bank is either restricted from a  profit-making activity (lending to fossil fuel companies) or forced to subsidize a money-losing activity (lending at below-market rates to green energy companies), the costs are borne by either the bank's shareholders or depositors, or, in some cases, by taxpayers. In fact, given that bank equity is such a small slice of overall capital, it is bank depositors who will be burdened the most by bank lending mandates, and that opens the door to bank failures and worse. 
4. And honest about cost sharing: One of the benefits of recognizing that being good (for the planet or society) creates costs is that we can then also follow up by looking at who bears the costs. It is my view that for much of the past few decades, we (as academics, policy makers and regulators) been far too quick to decide what works for the "greater good", at least as we see it, and oblivious to the reality that the costs of delivering that greater good are borne by the people who can least afford it. 
5. Above all,  drain the gravy train: Both ESG and sustainability have been contaminated by the many people and entities that have benefited monetarily from their existence. The path to making sustainability matter has to start by removing the grifters, many masquerading as academics and experts, from the space. I won’t name names, but if you want to see who you should be putting on that grifter list, many of them will be at the annual extravaganza called COP29, where the useful idiots and feckless knaves who inhabit this space will fly in from distant places to Azerbaijan, to lecture the rest of us on how to minimize our carbon footprint. If you are a business that cares about the planet, fire your sustainability consultants and stop bending business models to meet disclosure needs, and while you are at it, you may want to get rid of your CSO (if you have one), unless you happen to have Yoda on your payroll. 

In all of this discussion, there is a real problem that no one in the space seems to be willing to accept or admit to, and that is much as we (as consumers, investors and voters) claim to care about social good, we are unwilling to burden ourselves, even slightly (by paying higher prices or taxes), to deliver that good. It could be because we are callous, or have become so, but I think the true reason is that we have lost trust in experts, governments and institutions, and who can blame us?  Whether it is the city of San Diego, where I live, trying to increase sales taxes by half a percent or a government imposing a carbon tax, taxpayers seem disinclined to given governments the benefit of doubt, given their history of inefficiencies and broken promises. 

    One argument that I have heard from many advocates for ESG and sustainability is that the pushback against these ideas is coming primarily from the United States, and that much of the rest of the world has bought in to their necessity and utility. If  these people leave the ivory towers and echo chambers that they inhabit, and talk to people in their own environs, they will recognize that the loss of trust is a global phenomenon, and that any consensus that exists is on the surface. There are many reasons that incumbent governments in Canada and Germany (both "leaders" in the climate change fight) are facing the political abyss in upcoming elections, but one reason is the "we know best" arrogance embedded in their climate change strictures and laws, combined with the insulting pitch that the people most affected by these laws will not feel the pain. 

    How do we get trust in institutions back? It will not come from lecturing people on their moral shortcomings (as many will undoubtedly do to me, after reading this) or by gaslighting them (telling them that they are better off when they are clearly and materially not). It will require humility, where the agents of change (academics, governments, regulators) are transparent about what they hope to accomplish, and the costs of and uncertainties about reaching those objectives, and patience, where incremental change takes precedence over seismic or revolutionary change. 

YouTube Video

My posts on ESG, impact investing and stakeholder wealth

1. From Shareholder Wealth to Stakeholder Interests: CEO Capitulation or Empty Doublespeak? (August 2019)
2. Sounding Good or Doing Good? A Skeptical Look at ESG (September 2020)
3. The ESG Movement: The "Goodness" Gravy Train Rolls On! (September 2021)
4. ESG's Russia Test: Trial by Fire or Crash and Burn? (March 2022)
5. Good Intentions, Perverse Outcomes: The Impact of Impact Investing (October 2023)

The Wisdom and Madness of Crowds: Market Prices as Political Predictors!

    In this, the first full week in November 2024, the big news stories of this week are political, as the US presidential election reached its climactic moment on Tuesday, but I don't write about politics, not because I do not have political views, but because I reserve those views are for my friends and family. The focus of my writing has always been on markets and companies, more micro than macro, and I am sure that you will find my spouting off about who I voted for, and why, off-putting, much as I did in his cycle, when celebrities and sports stars told me their voting plans. This post, though, does have a political angle, albeit with a market twist. During the just-concluded presidential election, we saw  election markets, allowing you to predict almost every subset of the election, not only open up and grow, but also insert themselves into the political discourse. I would like to use this post to examine how these markets did during the lead in to the election, and then expand the discussion to a more general one of what markets do well, what they do badly, i.e., revisit an age-old divide between those who believe in the wisdom of crowds and and those that point to their madness.

Election Forecasts: From polls to political markets

    I watched the movie "Conclave"just a couple of days ago, and it is about the death of a pope, and the meeting to pick a replacement. (It is based on a book by Robert Harris, one of my favorite authors.) In the movie, as the hundred-plus Catholic cardinals gathered in the Sistine chapel, to pick a pope,  I was struck by how the leading candidates gauged support and jockeyed ahead of the election, essentially informally polling their brethren. I know that the movie (and book) is fiction, but I am sure that the actual conclaves that have characterized papal succession for centuries have used  informal polling as a way of forecasting election winners for centuries. In fact, going back to the very first democracies in Greek and Roman times, where notwithstanding the restrictions on who could vote, there were attempts to assess election winners and losers, ahead of the event. 

    The first reported example of formal polling occurred ahead of the 1824 presidential election, when the Raleigh Star and North Carolina Gazette polled 504 voters to determine (rightly) that Andrew Jackson would beat John Quincy Adams. Starting in 1916, The Literary Digest started a political survey, asking its readers, and after correctly predicting the next four elections, failed badly in 1936 (predicting that Alf Landon would beat FDR in the election that year, when, in fact, he lost in a landslide). While polling found its statistical roots after that, it had one of its early dark moments, in 1948, when pollsters predictions that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman were upended on Election Day, leading to one of the most famous headlines of all time (in the Chicago Tribune). In the decades after, polling did learn valuable lessons about sampling bias and with an assist from technological advancements, and the number of pollsters has proliferated. Coming into this century, pollsters were convinced that they had largely ironed out their big problems, but even at it peak, polls came with noise (standard errors), though pollsters were not always transparent about it, and the public took polling estimates as facts. 

    The fact that individual polls, even if not biased, are noisy (with ranges around estimates) led to a  poll aggregators, which collected individual polls and averaged them out to yield presumably a more precise estimate. Here, for example, is the aggregated value from Real Clear Politics (RCP), which has been doing this for at least four presidential election cycles now, leading into election days in the US (November 5):

While the original reason for aggregation was removing bias, aggregators can still induce bias by deciding which polls to include (and exclude) in their averages, and sometimes in how they weight these polls. While RCP computes simple averages, there are other aggregators who weight polls, based generally on their accuracy in prior elections, but bias enters in insidious ways.

    The pushback in poll-based forecasting (whether individual or aggregated) is that it may miss fundamentals on voter history and predilections, and in the last three cycles, there have been a few polling pundits who have used polling aggregates and their presumably deeper understanding of fundamentals to make judgments on who will win the election. Two are the best known are 538.com, a site that used to be part of the New York Times but is now owned by ABC, and Nate Silver's personal assessment, and leading into the election, here were their assessments for the election:

Both arrive at their estimates using Monte Carlo simulations, based upon data fed into the system. Note that polls, aggregated polls and poll judgment calls have run into problems in the last decade, some of which may be insurmountable. The first is the advent of smartphones (replacing land lines) and call screening allows callers to not answer some call, and polls have had to struggle with the consequences for sampling bias. The second is that a segment of the population has become tough, if not impossible, to poll, sometimes lying to pollsters, and to the extent that they are more likely to be for one side of the political divide, there will be systematic error in polls that will not average out, and those errors feed into polling judgments.

    With poll-based forecasts being less reliable and trusted, a vacuum opened up leading into the 2024 elections, and political markets have stepped into the gap. While it has always been possible to bet on elections, either in Las Vegas or through UK-based betting sites like Betfair, they are odd-driven, opaque and restricted. In contrast, Polymarket opened markets on US election outcomes (president, senate, by state, etc.), and through much of 2024, it has given watchers a measure of what investors in that market thought about who would win the election. In the graph below, you can see the Polymarket prices for a "Trump win" and a "Harris win" in the months leading into the election:

Note that until July, it was Joe Biden who was the democratic nominee for president, and the only portion of the graph that is relevant is the section starting in late July, when Kamala Harris became the nominee. 

    Mid-year, Polymarket was joined by Kalshi, structured very similarly, with slightly different rules on trading and transactions costs, and that market's assessment of who would win the market is below:

Since both markets existed in tandem for the months leading into the election, there were intriguing questions that emerged. 

• The first is that at almost every point in time, in the months that they have co-existed, the prices for a Trump or Harris win on the two pricing platforms were different, with the prices on Kalshi generally running a little lower than on Polymarket for a Trump win. 

In theory, this looks like an arbitrage opportunity, where you could buy the Trump win on the cheaper market and sell it on the more expensive one, but the transactions costs (1-2% in both markets) would have made them tough to pull off. 

• The second is that within each market, there were a proliferation of contracts covering the same outcome, trading at different prices. For instance, on Polymarket, you could buy a Trump win contract for one price, a a Republican win contract at a slightly higher price, leading into just last week, but that difference could just reflect concerns on mortality.

Do the actual results vindicate political markets? At least on this election, the answer is nominally yes, since the political markets attached a higher probability for a decisive victory for Trump in the electoral college than did the poll aggregators or judgments. However, political markets did not expect Trump to win the popular vote, which he may end up doing (some states are still counting), and that can be taken as evidence that markets can be surprised sometimes.  In the weeks leading into the election, there were two dimensions on which political markets varied from the polls and aggregators. On the plus side, the political markets were more dynamic, reflecting in real time, responses to events like the debates, interviews and endorsements; Polymarket's odds of a Trump win dropped by almost 10% after the debate. On the minus side, political markets were much more volatile than the polls, with swings driven sometimes by large trades; the Wall Street Journal highlighted one trader who put almost $30 million into the market on the Trump win, pushing up the price.

The Wisdom of Crowds

    That trust in crowd judgments in guiding our actions is not restricted to politics. In an earlier part of this post, I talked about going to the movies, and it is indicative of the times we live in that my movie choice was made, not by reading movie reviews on the newspaper, but by movie ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. Once the movie was done, the restaurant choice I made was determined by Yelp reviews, and without boring you further, you can see this pattern unfold as you think about how you choose the products you buy on Amazon or even the services (plumbing, electrical, landscaping) that you go with, as a consumer. On a less personal and larger scale,  the block chains that underlie Bitcoin transactions represent a crowd sourcing of the checking process (performed by institutions like banks conventionally), and you can argue that trusting social media to deliver you information is essentially crowd-sourcing your news.

   With these examples, you can see one of the dangers of crowd judgments, and that is that in all the crowds described above (Rotten Tomatoes, Yelp, Amazon product reviews and social media), there is no cost to entry, or to offer an opinion, and that can dilute the power of the judgments. In every one of these sites, you can game the system to give high ratings to awful movies and terrible restaurants, and social media news can be filled with distortions. With markets, we introduce an entry fee to those who want to join the crowd in the form of price, and demand more money to amplify those views.  In the words of Nassim Taleb, opinionated people with no skin in the game can make outlandish predictions, often with no accountability. If you don't believe me, watch the parade of experts and market gurus on any financial television channel, and notice how they are allowed to conveniently gloss over their own forecasts and predictions from earlier periods. In contrast, no matter what you think about the experience or motivations of traders on a market, they have to put money behind their views.

    When you use the price in a market as an assessment of the likelihood of an event, which is what you are implicitly doing when you trust Polymarket or Kashi prices as predictors of election winners, you are, in effect, trusting the crowd (albeit a selective one of those who trade on these markets) to be closer to the right outcome than polling experts or opinion leaders. When market price based forecasts are offered as alternatives to expert forecasts, the push back that you get is that experts have a deeper knowledge of what is being predicted. So, why do we trust and attach weight to the prices that investors assess for something? There are three reasons:

1. Information aggregation: One of the almost magical aspects of well-functioning markets is how pieces of information possessed by individual traders about whatever is being traded get aggregated, delivering a composite price that is effectively a reflection of all of the information. 
2. Real time adjustments to news: While experts (rightfully) take their time to absorb new information and reflect that information in their assessments, markets do not have the luxury of waiting. Consequently, markets react in real time, often in the moment, to events as they unfold, and studies that look at that reaction find that they often not only beat experts to the punch but deliver better assessments. 
3. Law of large numbers: It is true that individual traders in a markets can make mistakes, often big ones, in their assessments of value, and can sometimes also let their preconceptions and biases drive their trading. To the extent that these mistakes and biases can lie on both sides, they will average out, allowing the "right' price to emerge from several wrong judgments.

There is also a strand of research that is developing on the forecasting abilities of experts versus amateurs and it is not favorable for the former. Phil Tetlock, co-author of the book on super forecasting, chronicles the dismal record of expert forecasts, and argues that the best forecasts come from foxes (knows many things, but not in depth) and not hedgehogs (with deep expertise in the discipline). To the extent that a market is filled with amateurs, with very different knowledge and skill sets, Tetlock's work can be viewed as being supportive of market-based forecasts.

The Madness of Crowds

     Well before we had Rotten Tomatoes and Twitter were conceived, we had financial markets, and not surprisingly, much of the most interesting research on crowd behavior has come from looking at those markets.. Our experience there is that while markets allow for information aggregation and consensus judgments that are almost magical in their timeliness and assessment quality, they are also capable of making mistakes, sometimes monumental ones. One of my favorite books is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Markets, published in 1841, and it chronicles how market mistakes form and grow, using the South Sea Bubble and the Tulip Bulb Craze as illustrative examples. To those who believe that markets have somehow evolved since then to avoid these mistakes, behavioral finance provides the counter, which is that the behavioral quirks that gave rise to those bubble are still present, and may actually be amplified by technology and large platforms. The falsehood that was born in a pub in the South Sea bubble often looks weeks to work its way into market prices, but the same falsehood on a large social media platform today could affect prices almost instantaneously. 

    Without making this a treatise on behavioral finance, here are some of the problems that can lead markets off course, and make prices poor predictors of outcomes:    

1. Noise drowns out information: In finance, we use noise as a term to capture all of the stories and influences that should have no effect on value, but that can still affect prices. While noise exists in even the best-functioning markets, there is enough information in those markets to offset the noise effect, and bring prices back into sync with value. However, if noise is the dominant force in a market, it can drown out information, causing prices to delink from information. 
2. Momentum versus Fundamentals: On a related note, it is worth remembering that the strongest force in markets is momentum, where price movements are driven more by price movements in past periods, than by fundamentals. While in a well-functioning market, that momentum will  be checked by bargain hunters (if the price is pushed too low) or short sellers (if it is pushed too high), a market where one or the other of these players is either rare or non-existent can see momentum run rampant. It is one reason that I think that markets that restrict short selling, often labeling it as speculation, are creating the condition for market madness.
3. Participant bias: While markets require skin in the game from traders, that requires money, and that biases markets against people with little or no money. In political markets, for instance, it could be argued that the traders on Polymarket and Kalshi represent a subset of the population (younger, better off) that may differ from the voting population. 
4. Market Manipulation: The history of financial markets also includes clear cases where markets have been manipulated, to deliver profits to the manipulators. That problem becomes worse in markets with limited liquidity, where big trades can move prices, and where market insiders have access to data that outsiders do not. 
5. Illiquidity: All of the problems listed above become greater in a market where liquidity is light, since a large trade, whether motivated by noise, momentum or manipulation, will move prices more. 
6. Feedback loop: There are times where market prices can affect the fundamentals, and through them, the value of what is being traded. With publicly traded companies, a higher stock price, for instance, may allow the companies to issue shares at these higher prices, to finance investments and acquisitions. With the political markets, this feedback loop manifested itself in my social media feeds, where I often saw the Polymarket or Kashi charts being used by candidates to convince potential voters that they were winning (to get them to jump on the bandwagon) or losing (to get people to give them money).

Political markets are young, attract a subset of participants, and have limited liquidity (though it did improve over the course of the months), and there were clearly times in the weeks leading in to the election, where crowd madness overwhelmed crowd wisdom. On a optimistic note, these markets are not going away, and it is almost certain that there will be more traders in these markets in the next go-around and that some of the frictions will decrease. 

To "crowd" or not to "crowd"

    I am convinced that in making our choices as consumers and citizens, we will be facing the choice between market-based assessments and expert assessment on more and more dimensions of our life. Thus, our weather forecasts may no longer come from meteorologists, but from a weather market where weather traders will tell us what tomorrow's temperature will be or how much snow will be delivered by a snow storm. As we face these choices, there will be two camps about whether market prices should be trusted. One, rooted in the wisdom of markets, will push us to accept more crowd-sourcing and crowd-judgments, and the other, building on market madness, will point to all the things that markets can get wrong. 

    While I do believe that, in balance, the wisdom will offset the madness in most markets, there are places where I will stay wary, as a user of market prices. Put simply, rather than view this as an either/or choice, consider using both a  market pricing, if available, and a professional assessment. In the context of my discipline, which is valuation, I use both market assessment of country default risk, in the form of sovereign CDS spreads, and sovereign ratings, from the ratings agencies. The latter have more knowledge and expertise, but they are also slow to react to changes on the ground, and I am glad that I have market prices to fill in that gap.  If you are planning to trade on these markets, I would hope you will heed my admonition from this post, where I argued that if you are buying or selling something that has no cash flows, you can only trade, not value, it. In the context of political markets, the price that you are paying is a function of probabilities of outcomes and your capacity to make money in the market will come from you being able to assess those probabilities better than the rest of the market. 

    There is another use for these political market securities that you may want to consider. To the extent that you feel emotionally invested in one candidate winning, and you don't have much faith in your probability assessments, you may want to consider buying shares in the other candidate. That way, no matter what the outcome, you will have a partially offsetting benefit; a win for your candidate will make you happy, but you will lose some money on your political market bet, and a loss for your candidate may be emotionally devastating, but you may be able to soothe your pain with a financial windfall.

YouTube Video

Political Market Links

1. Polymarket
2. Kalshi

Book Links

1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Markets
2. Conclave (Robert Harris)