Opinion: The immorality of betting on war

You can place a bet on just about anything these days. Not just who will win the Super Bowl, or the Kentucky Derby, but what we still call “the news.” Who will be elected? Will interest rates go up or down? You can even bet on weather events, and acts of war.

As NPR’s Bobby Allyn has reported, an account on the prediction market Polymarket with the username “Magamyman,” made more than $500,000 by predicting the strike on Iran last Saturday that killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This comes after an unnamed trader made hundreds of thousands predicting the ouster of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in January, just hours before the U.S. raid that captured him.

Prediction markets are exchanges where people can place bets on the outcome of almost anything. It could be a Formula One race. But it could also be — and I quote the wording of an offering on Polymarket — “Nuclear detonation by…?

Senate Democrats have introduced a bill to ban members of Congress and senior administration officials — including the president and vice president — from putting money on specific events in these markets.

Rep. Mike Levin, a Democrat from California, wrote on X, “Prediction markets cannot be a vehicle for profiting off advance knowledge of military action.”

But even if the rest of us can legally make such bets, should we?

I have been with families in refugee camps in Ethiopia, Kosovo, and Iraq, who had to run from their homes with just the clothes they wore, and a few family photos if they had time to grab them, as soldiers rushed into their towns. Those families risked their lives to leave, betting on an unknown future.

I have been with people in Sarajevo who had to decide when to run across a street clutching food or medicine for their loved ones. They knew their steps might catch the eyes of snipers. We’d crouch alongside them behind a wall, where they often muttered a prayer and told us before running into the open, “Here goes…”

We saw quite a few brave people make it to safety; and quite a few brave people die trying.

The bets they placed were to risk their lives for those they loved. Prediction market users make their wartime gambits from someplace comfortable and safe, and hope to hit it big off of someone else’s misfortune.