Making Predictions About President Trump's Priority Projects List
Aging, obsolete, under-maintained infrastructure can be a mundane topic. Many take the transportation and utilities infrastructure their lives and livelihoods depend on for granted. Infrastructure issues don't often make for viral content on social media or news outlets, unless there's a high profile infrastructure failure like a bridge collapse. Furthermore, many don't realize the long term economic impacts of failing to make the (costly) capital improvements necessary to add infrastructure capacity and capability to sustain economic growth.
Hence, funding major investment in infrastructure isn't always politically expedient. However, a preliminary list that identifies infrastructure requirements and potential projects around the United States that might compete for federal funding was reportedly provided to the National Governor’s Association by President Trump's transition team earlier this year. Developing a broad, common understanding of how these infrastructure requirements and others might be integrated into future master plans and eventually implemented will be essential to supporting the highest performing projects that will benefit everyone. This is obviously not a trivial task. It involves asking questions about a variety of possible future events, states, and outcomes of these projects and getting accurate and honest answers to them.
Asking individuals (even experts or presidents) for answers to questions about future events, states, or outcomes of these potential projects will not necessarily result in accurate or honest answers. However, asking a "wise crowd" (a large group of individuals that meets certain criteria) can be as accurate as, and often better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within that group. Augur is developing a decentralized, block-chain based platform to support prediction markets as an incentive for "wise crowds" to answer such questions. For example:
The Built Environment Innovation Cooperative (BEIC) sees this list of infrastructure projects as an opportunity for students to increase their economic literacy within the subject matter area of major infrastructure and other built environment improvement projects. How? By creating and studying predictive markets about them. This is an approach used by the University of Iowa's Iowa Electronic Markets as a internet-based teaching and research tool (primarily for political prediction markets). By creating these markets within Augur, students (and potentially other members of a "wise crowd") can invest and trade in a variety of prediction market smart contracts. Would you invest and trade in built environment project prediction markets?