The glass beads of global war: dealing, death and the policy analysis market

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to subject the short lived “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM) – “a Pentagon betting market on terror attacks” – and media and academic reactions to it, to some critical analysis.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper engages sustained invocation of the relationship between simulation and representation, for the story of the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) and its demise is replete with the tension between the two. It interrogates a range of accounts of the (un)timely demise of PAM, from the fearful senators and the moralistic media who subsumed and buttressed their position to the market evangelists for whom the failure of this particular market was merely proof of the veracity of markets elsewhere.

Findings

It is found that, inter alia, PAM was not really market‐like enough and, indeed, that it duplicated in impoverished form already existing markets that pertain to its objects of interest; that it was too much a market, given that its “goods” are seemingly inappropriate for market trade; and that it exposed too much of the truth of the actual operation of existing markets via the difficulties it confronted with regard to the possibility of insider dealing.

Originality/value

By contextualising PAM within the so‐called war on terror of which it was part, we see in the tension between representation and simulation, tension between a singular and a manifold reality; a set of tensions which make clear the extent of the gap that must exist between cause and effect, truth and prediction. The paper concludes by joining the celebration of PAM's demise whilst yearning for a similar fate to befall the other monologues that brought it to silence.

Citation

Lightfoot, G. and Lilley, S. (2007), "The glass beads of global war: dealing, death and the policy analysis market", Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 83-100. https://doi.org/10.1108/17422040710722579