Chance would be a fine thing

If I prang your car, we can swap insurance details. In the past, it would have been necessary for you to kill me. That’s the great thing about money: it makes liabilities payable and blood feud unnecessary.

Spare a thought, then, for the economist Robin Hanson, whose idea it was, in the years following the attacks on the World Trade Center, to create a market where traders could speculate on political atrocities.