On December 21, 2024, my friend Dan Klein, an economics professor at George Mason University, sent out an email to a list that I’m no longer on but cc:ed me, with the following offer:
Anyone want to give me 8:1 odds that on Jan 21 Trump won’t have been inaugurated?
He linked to this post on X. I didn’t even bother clicking on the link because those odds looked good to me. We went back and forth a few times. I worried about things like intense storms that might slow it down by a day, and Dan was quite gracious in making the deadline midnight on January 21.
So I offered $800 against his $100 and he accepted. We both hoped that I would win.
I did win, and Dan has already informed me that he has sent the check. He gave me permission to post on this.
Would I have offered 20:1 odds? No. A number of things could have gone wrong. Trump could have been assassinated—he missed one attempt by turning his head. He could have been shot but not killed and laid up unconscious in bed. Dan’s worry, which I now know by having clicked on the X file (pun intended), is that the Democrats would have figured out a way to slow it down. I thought that to be highly unlikely. Whatever the reason for a delay, you can probably see why both Dan and I hoped I would win.
By the way, I have rarely had anything nice to say about Kamala Harris. But I thought she showed tremendous grace in overseeing the reporting of the electoral college votes on January 6.
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