Before Kalshi and Polymarket there was the Iowa Electronic Markets : Planet Money

Before Kalshi and Polymarket, prediction markets also had earlier U.S. experiments, including the Iowa Electronic Markets, according to an excerpt shared from NPR’s Planet Money and produced in collaboration with the history podcast Throughline. The piece recalls how election betting was common until the 1940s, then disappeared, and notes that in the 1980s economists designed an election market that reportedly outperformed election polling 74% of the time. The excerpt also references early markets for betting on terrorism and on military uses of prediction markets, presenting how those ideas evolved before modern platforms. It does not provide new market data, focusing instead on historical context. Planet Money credits the episode’s production, editing, engineering, and music team, but presents the main material as an NPR-supported re-airing.