THE HISTORY of POLITICAL BETTING “Bet Or Be Silent.”[0401A]
FORECAST ERROR: SUPPLEMENT 1: THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL BETTING “Bet or be silent.”[0401a] A March 6th 1776 bet in Almack’s Gentlemen’s club (later Brooks’) that Lord North would “fall by the hands of justice” before “Mr Hancock”. Lord North was the Prime Minister of Great Britain during the American War of Independence, and John Hancock was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. The bet was on who would be hung first… 1. PREAMBLE The scheduled article of the “Forecast Error” series for 2019 covered political betting, and it proceeded as normal: read up on the history, interview experts, gather sources and write. But it rapidly became obvious that the history element was taking on a life of its own. The previous article on political opinion polls only went back to the 1930’s, but the political betting history just kept going back and back: 19th, 18th, 17th… 12th century? The Crusades? The history was overwhelming the article. Thankfully, the solution was obvious. The editor of Significance suggested that the history be spun off into its own article and a more truncated section installed in its place. We agreed, and the spinoff article covered nineteenth century Victorian repression, Regency libertines, the Restoration, the Puritans, all the way back to Richard the Lionheart. Its centuries-long course has matched the evolution of the law, the class struggle and the country itself. It covers wars, famines, religion, Chief Justices, and a teenager who became Prime Minister. It became the history of us all… 2. HISTORY Human gambling is as old as recorded human history, and one may point to examples in Pharonic Egypt[0405a], Imperial Rome[0405a], Greek mythology[0405a], the Mahabharata [0405a], the Bible[0405a] which allows gambling, and the Qur’an[0405a] which doesn’t.
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