Jimmy Carter's 100th Birthday!
Carter did what he once had a 2% chance of doing: becoming the first centenarian president! A retrospective by Jacob Cohen (@Conflux).
Jimmy Carter was 98 when he entered hospice care.
36% of hospice patients die in a week. 90% die within six months.
Manifold put his odds of making it 19 months (and turning 100) at 2%.
His initial odds of making it two weeks, until March 1st, 2023, were around 25% at first. He beat those odds, and he beat the odds to survive until April 1st too.
But on March 31st, the user Predictor made a massive bet bringing Carter’s odds of surviving until May from 67% to 2%. I thought this was news-trading, because Jimmy Carter had passed away. But it wasn’t. He beat the odds to survive until June, and until October 1st, 2023, his 99th birthday—
and until today, his 100th birthday!
Welcome to today’s special edition of Above the Fold: Manifold Politics! Since last time, there’s been a fair bit of political news:
There was a Harris-Trump debate which inspired the parody “They’re Eating The Dogs”.
There was a second Trump assassination attempt.
NYC Mayor Eric Adams was indicted, and Andrew Cuomo is plotting a comeback.
The “toss-up North Carolina Governor’s election” became … not that. I assume you’ve seen the Mark Robinson stuff?
In what was described as “like two wizards bickering,” Nate Silver and Allan Lichtman feuded over who was better at turning keys (specifically, the 13 Keys to the White House).1
Saturday Night Live just came back (with a pretty funny show, if you ask me). They had Bowen Yang as JD Vance (forecast by Manifold as the most likely, with 37% probability) and Jim Gaffigan as Tim Walz (more of an underdog, at 15%). Also a new best Joe Biden impression.
Trump’s chance of winning went from 46% to…46% (or 45% in the sweepstakes market).
The presidential race has remained stressful and close. But that hasn’t gotten me out of newsletter-writing semi-retirement, has it? Not like THE GLORIOUS HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY OF THE IMMORTAL PEANUT LEGEND HIMSELF, JIMMY CARTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(yes, that’s one hundred exclamation marks, believe it or not. just like jimmy, above the fold: manifold politics is alive)
It’s actually Jimmy Carter Day in Georgia now — officially. For this celebratory 100th birthday newsletter, I thought I’d provide a retrospective on the Carter markets, some commentary on death markets philosophically, and even a few fun Jimmy Carter Facts!
(But first: You can watch the VP debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz tonight on Manifold TV at https://manifold.markets/tv/81!)
The Jimmy Carter centenarian market was created over two years ago, on April 18, 2022.
At first, it didn’t attract much attention — just some forecasters performing actuarial calculations, adjusting for Carter’s status and wealth. The centenarian market reached 49%.
But after the hospice announcement, the market plummeted. Bettors thought the centenarian one wasn’t even worth focusing on, and tended to trade on the more short-term markets about surviving to March or April.
On April 24, the user Potato made his first trade on the market.
I scrolled through all of Potato’s trades on this market. There were 1306 trades. One of them was “Sell 20 YES”, but all of the other 1305 were orders to buy YES. Reinvesting nearly all his profits, loans, and bonuses into the market, he ultimately amassed 585,262 YES shares.
Here is a sample of his market comments:
i believe in jimmy
The fact that he's survived this long after being in hospice should indicate that the probability is much higher than 9%
Carter has been in hospice for nearly a year with no health flare-ups reported by the media since then. The market should be a lot higher... I suspect that many people tank this just because he's in hospice, but hospice care can actually increase life expectancy (https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2018/0301/od2.html#:~:text=Receiving%20at%20least%20one%20day,by%20up%20to%20three%20months)
at this point, he’s alert, has a strong will to live, and with less than two months remaining, the probability should be around 95%
touch grass lil boi
But I wanted a deeper understanding of the intellect that gave Potato the courage to bet his entire portfolio on Jimmy. Fortunately, I’ve been able to make his acquaintance. I have it on good authority that he is a student at a prestigious Ivy League university. He is skilled in mathematics, too.
I talked with Potato via Discord DMs, hoping for actuarial forecasting secrets. Here was the insight he provided into his strategy:
I think I was just really lucky lmao
Also I put like all my mana into that market and thought that if he died I’ll just quit manifold cuz I don’t use it that much
But like objectively, the odds were probably stacked against him so I didn’t have any real reason to believe in Jimmy
Sometimes, it’s less about complex math and more about the narrative — and believing in Jimmy.
Wobbles, the NUMBER ONE BIGGEST JIMMY CARTER FAN, made a profit of M65,732 on the market. He also attributes his success to luck — he was the first person to respond when Predictor tanked the market to 2% last April — and said this:
it seemed like a fun long term gamble, and who doesn’t like to be a little patriotic
…haha yeah, but um a lot of people, especially early in the market would give data about life expectancy for his situation and i would kinda just act like it didn’t exist
…oh also this market it the only reason my account is positive
…just make sure everyone knows i’m his biggest fan
More Serious Deathcasting Insights
There are many universes in which Jimmy Carter had passed away by now, and I’m not writing this newsletter on his 100th birthday. In these sadder universes, Potato and Wobbles don’t look like super-profitable geniuses: they’re just random users who lost it all somewhere. So perhaps we can learn more from the people who traded in both directions, and were guided more by evidence.
Joshua, top-5 (and former #1) all-time trader, managed to bet NO on the centenarian market at 15% — and sell those shares for a profit! He told me that his forecasting strategy on longevity markets is “I mostly avoid them unless they are obviously mispriced… The most mispriced markets are the ones about if someone is already secretly dead/dying.” (He linked this market “Is Joe Biden dead?” where he turned a profit of M5,376.)
As for the Carter market, it fell from 31 to the mid-twenties upon the tragic news of Rosalynn Carter’s death in November 2023. An active First Lady often referred to as an equal partner in governing, she and Jimmy were continuously married for 77 years. Traders worried that her passing would decrease Carter’s strength and motivation to live.
Market comments included “The photos of him at the funeral [of Rosalynn] were a downward update.” and “Gotta be honest guys, in the recent pictures he looks like a corpse already.”
Another big drop came this May (68% to 50ish), when Carter’s grandson Jason said that his grandfather was “coming to the end.”
But the market recovered.
Traders also reflected more on “hospice” as an indicator of death. Jonathan Ray wrote in June:
Social security actuarial table alone gives him (1-0.3416)^(109/365) = 0.88 chance of survival. The average hospice stay is 70 days but that's such a heterogeneous group that it seems reasonable to increase, rather than decrease, his life expectancy with each day he survives in there. Conditioning on the fact that he's already survived 1.3 years in hospice, his life expectancy is probably at least several months. It's hard to have a strong inside view that he's going to croak imminently when the interview with the family says nothing's changed in the last few months and the only remarkable thing is that he sleeps a lot.
In September, it was reported that Jimmy Carter was motivated to vote for Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Birthdays are just birthdays, he said, but he cared about the country. (And his home state, Georgia, is now an important swing state, so it could matter…)
Traders give a 90% chance that he’ll achieve his goal of voting in the election!
N/A Resolutions
QuantumGambler posted this comment yesterday:
I ham thinking about this very much today, and it is best for all traders here for N/A resolving here. The man is living and maybe it is a rude way of thinking of us for having a market like this. Everyone will get the mana back and we can go on with living our lives like the Jimmy Carter! So please do right for us traders and we can make it N/A and it can all go away like nothing ever has happened to us here. It is the only way forward. Please N/A it, end of discussion with you.
I’ve long felt that N/A resolutions are a good resolution to controversial markets, since they undo all profits and losses. But sometimes, for a user who mis-predicted (Quantum is down M76,835 on this one), there is an incentive to fabricate controversy… which we see on display here.
I can’t quite tell if QuantumGambler is joking. I did find their comment amusing, assuming it is a joke :)
Ethics Concerns
But taking the comment seriously (if not literally) for a moment: is it ethical to bet on markets about the death of a real person?
This is a common concern, it’s one Manifold has thought a lot about, and it’s an intuition I also have.
It comes from a variety of perspectives. One argument: doesn’t this incentivize people to bet NO and then assassinate Jimmy Carter for profit?
Scott Alexander rebuts this line of reasoning in his Prediction Market FAQ:
I think the strongest evidence against is that this basically never happens in stock markets. Tesla stock would plummet if Elon Musk died or resigned, but nobody realistically worries that Musk’s doctor will short Tesla and poison him. Lots of corporations’ stocks would sink to zero if you burned down their offices and factories, but nobody shorts them and then commits arson.
Probably this is because there are laws against doing harmful and illegal things, and people have decided that stock market gains aren’t worth breaking the law and getting punished. Since prediction markets have only a tiny fraction of the amount of money that stock markets do, probably people won’t consider it worthwhile to commit harmful actions to manipulate them either. If you were going to murder someone to profit off a market, who would you rather kill: a US politician (the PredictIt market on the presidential election has a volume of about $600,000)? Or a Fortune 500 CEO (whose companies might have market caps in the hundreds of billions)?
…What about prediction markets in very specific harmful or illegal activities?
I guess if you created a market in “Will someone burn down the 7-11 on Main Street tomorrow at 3:32 AM?”, then bet a lot of money, then did it, that would be bad.
I think realistically nobody would bet against you on that. But probably prediction markets should avoid hosting markets on these very specific bad things, just to make sure.
But there’s a weaker version of this argument which depends on who you are as a person, but to me it feels very true: when I bet NO on a market like this, I still want Carter to stay alive. But sometimes there’s a part of me that wants Carter to die, so I can feel like I’ve won the game. It’s like this with elections, too, when I bet on a dispreferred candidate; or policies, when I bet on the thing I don’t want to happen.
This feels gross.
A Personal Story about Death Markets
Getting back to death markets, some time ago I learned from a video that Dianna Cowern, known on YouTube as “Physics Girl,” was in really dire condition. I felt empathetic, and worried. I really hoped she wouldn’t die, but I wasn’t famiiliar with the medical research on her condition. I wanted to know what the reality was.
So I made a market about whether she would die. To be safe, I made a clause that if Dianna or any of her representatives wanted the market gone, I would N/A it.
Still, I felt bad making the market. It gave me “the ick.” (I think it’s even worse when you phrase it, as I did, like “Will X die” instead of “Will X survive.”) I think Physics Girl counts as a public figure, but I don’t know that she’d have appreciated this market existing.
Death is a taboo subject in our culture: that’s part of why it feels gross. But that’s the same reason that it’s hard to figure out the true odds. A commenter provided the info I was looking for about her condition — she was unlikely to die — and I felt like I was better informed. I still feel uneasy about making the market. I don’t know if I’d do it again. It feels gross.
Dianna is still alive, but she hasn’t recovered. I hope she does.
Manifold does not host personal markets on non-public figures who do not consent. If you feel like a market is having a negative impact on the world, let us know: we are committed to being a website which minimizes social harm.
Markets Teach Us What Matters
But even when markets may be on uncomfortable subjects, we can learn a lot about how to think of them — for the Jimmy Carter markets. By bringing together forecasters who are interested in a question, the markets can teach us what matters to that question — if we know where to look.
Based on the sentiments expressed by traders above, here are the ten (√100?) key factors that top forecasters used to predict Carter turning 100:
Actuarial data, including from the Social Security Administration (for base rates).
Partner death, and impact on morale.
Circumstantial evidence from photos.
Interpreting statements from people close to the situation.
Understanding that hospice patients have wide variation.
Seeing that motivation is important to longevity, and Carter is a motiated person.
Obvious mispricings, like all markets.
Understanding of time decay (this market should trend upward).
Luck (for those who won really big).
Believing in Jimmy
The Story of Jimmy Carter
The Jimmy Carter centenarian market may have only been created on April 18, 2022, but the story truly begins one hundred years ago, on October 1, 1924, at the Wise Sanitarium in the small town of Plains, Georgia, where a boy by the name of James Earl Carter, Jr. was born. He was actually the first president to be born in a hospital, in part because his mom was a nurse. His family then moved to the nearby smaller town of Archery—
Okay, I won’t tell his entire life story in that level of detail.
But here’s a short summary: he grew up on a peanut farm, served in the Navy, came back to Georgia to run the farm, became a state senator and then (on his second try) governor, and then staged a longshot campaign to be president in 1976 — which he managed to win, running as an outsider in the aftermath of Watergate. His presidency was complicated (I’m a fan of the Presidential podcast, or this ACX book review, if you want to learn more), but he ultimately lost reelection to Ronald Reagan.
His post-presidency was very active. In the words of CNN:
Carter did not dedicate his post-presidential life to sitting on corporate boards and raking in speaking fees, as other recent presidents have done.
Carter got his hands dirty building houses, took on peace missions to Cuba and the Middle East, negotiated the release of hostages, lived in his home town, taught Sunday school and college classes, wrote books, and won Grammys.
His has been, indisputably, the longest, most righteous and most productive post-presidency in history, although John Quincy Adams’ post-presidential, anti-slavery efforts in Congress get honorable mention.
Here are a few Jimmy Carter Facts:
Jimmy Carter Fact #1: The first senator (and one of the first non-Georgian elected officials) to endorse Carter’s victorious 1976 presidential campaign was Joe Biden.
Jimmy Carter Fact #2: Carter was not always so honest. In 1970, in order to win, he campaigned for Georgia governor on a platform of racism, and was endorsed by several prominent segregationist organizations. But in his inaugural address, he declared “the time for racial discrimination was over.” He proceeded to govern as a racial progressive.
Jimmy Carter Fact #3: Carter’s noted “malaise speech” did not include the word “malaise.”
Jimmy Carter Fact #4: Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Jimmy Carter Fact #5: In 1979, Jimmy Carter was attacked by a giant swimming rabbit. (Really.)
The record for longest-lived US president was previously held by George H.W. Bush. Born four months before Carter, GHWB passed away in 2018 at the age of 94. (Following Bush are Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and — incredibly — John Adams.)
Carter is close to several other notable records:
Alf Landon, who lost the 1936 presidential election, is the longest-lived presidential nominee, at 100 years, 1 month. Manifold gave Carter a 71% chance to claim this record, but then Plasma Ballin’ traded on it after reading a draft of this article and moved it to 82%.
Albert Rossellini, the 15th governor of Washington, is the longest-lived US governor, having surivived 101 years and over 8 months. Manifold gave Carter only a 19% chance, but I bet it down to 7% after seeing a much more well-traded market with an 11% chance Carter survives to 101. (It’s now at 15%, though.)
The oldest currently living head of state is Guillermo Rodríguez of Ecuador, who is almost a year older than Carter. Also older than Carter are Khamtai Siphandone of Laos and Tomiichi Murayama of Japan. Manifold gives Carter a 16% chance to become the oldest currently-living former head of state.
If you’re interested in other longevity markets, mattyb has one called “Battle of the Nonagenarians: Who will outlive Jimmy Carter?”
One Last Market
My tradition is to highlight a “fun” market at the end of these newsletters. Actually my previous newsletter‘s “fun” markets was “Will Jimmy Carter live to see the pivot?” referencing Manifold’s pivot into the world of sweepstakes gambling. (Which is happening now!)
(One quick thing I want to say about sweepstakes that’s easy to overlook: if you are not looking for real-money gambling, and loved the old Manifold, the old Manifold is coming back alongside sweepstakes. Now that the mana ecosystem is separated off, all those great features that got taken away — like N/A resolutions, trader bonuses, loans, and more — are either back now or likely soon to return!)
Anyway, today’s pair of fun markets are about investment in Jimmy Carter memorabilia. Carter pins were a popular item at Manifest, and are (some would argue) a key Manifold status symbol. (I even bought one!) Will their value go up?
As usual, I’ve given each market a M1,000 subsidy to encourage accuracy.
I’m Jacob Cohen (aka Conflux), a student at Stanford University. I blog at tinyurl.com/confluxblog, make puzzles at puzzlesforprogress.net, and don’t release any new episodes of the Market Manipulation Podcast on your favorite podcast platform. Check out Manifold Politics at manifold.markets/elections, or via its Politics or 2024 Election categories. And if you enjoyed this newsletter, don’t forget to like, share, and/or subscribe to Above the Fold on Substack!
PS: Or if you live in Georgia, consider making the pilgrimage to the Jimmy Carter Peanut Statue! It’s about a 2.5 hour drive from Atlanta, and even closer to Columbus and Macon. I gave the market a M1,000 subsidy, too, because I couldn’t resist. Best of luck!
PSA that Allan Lichtman claimed in 2000, when his Keys predicted Gore, that they were predicting the popular vote. But in 2016, when his Keys predicted Trump, he retroactively started claiming they predicted the electoral vote. He still claims he’s predicted every election since 1984! I don't believe in the Keys, and admit to being strongly #TeamNate (though he is a bit argumentative on Twitter…)