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The legalization and popularity of gambling is more than just an immoral activity that has negative societal effects. It’s reflective of people losing hope in t

The legalization and popularity of gambling is more than just an immoral activity that has negative societal effects. It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better. Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing. If hard work or time doesn’t make your life better, then fate is just chance, and you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich, no matter how tiny that likelihood.

dist-epoch 1y ago
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- ayatollah 1y ago
  The stock market is gambling only for fools, while sports betting is gambling for everyone. False equivalence.
  - swarnie 1y ago
    It really depends how you use it. Put your 401k in to a global index and come back in 45 years? Yeah that's a false equivalence. Take out a bank loan and roll 0DTE options? That's 99% the same as sports gambling for me.
- deleted 1y ago
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- keiferski 1y ago
  That's a completely false equivalence, and an uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote.
- d4mi3n 1y ago
  Let's keep this conversation productive. I don't read OP's comment anything like your response seems to imply. While I don't think OP's point about morals is relevant here (they vary widely from culture to culture), equating the stock market to gambling misses out on a lot of nuance. Your average 401k retirement fund is going to outperform your average gambler 100% of the time over one's lifetime. Long term investments also tend to not prey on addictive patterns of behavior. I personally think for a society to function well, it behooves ourselves to recognize when there are certain patterns or behaviors that are self destructive if left unchecked. I feel addictive drugs and gambling fall into this category. That's not to say banning this behavior is the right call, but there's a lot of space to explore productive policies between full on bans and anything-goes.
roenxi 1y ago
> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better. Broadly speaking I probably agree with their conclusion. But they really should consider savings and investment before donating their money to a betting website - it is pretty much the only choice that is guaranteed to not make their lives better in any way. I can hazard a guess as to the major reason their life isn't improving, they aren't doing anything to make it better. The money supply generally grows at >5% annually in most English speaking countries, find a way to get a slice of that action if nothing else. If they really can't think of something to do with the money, give it to a friend. Then at least maybe there is some social capital for a rainy day.
- keiferski 1y ago
  The vast, vast majority of people that have gambling problems aren't making rational financial decisions like this. They're doing a habitual activity that is reinforced by bad actors trying to extract as much money from them as possible. This is especially noticeable with "traditional" offline gambling and lotteries - lower income people play them habitually from a kind of learned helplessness, not as a rational financial strategy. https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/lottery-tickets-poor-rich-income-powerball-mega-millions-jackpot-odds-les-bernal-stop-predatory-gambling/ https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/lottery-tickets-poor-rich-inc...
  - roenxi 1y ago
    Sure, seems likely in a lot of cases. But if the starting point is talking about someone who makes chronically irrational decisions then life is going to seem a bit hopeless. The issue isn't as much they're giving up as it is that they aren't making rational decisions. Thread ancestor was saying "Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing". And I think that the problem here is that the people involved couldn't climb the ladder if you put their hands on it. To climb the ladder of success requires the grip of a rational actor. If someone is gambling then the #1 problem is not the system in itself, but the fact that for whatever reason they don't understand the concept of investment at a fundamental level. Can't help that person by changing gambling policies around. If they aren't going to invest themselves, then at the end of the day they are always going to be dependent on the charity of someone who will, whether they irrationally waste their money on gambling or some other vice.
victorbjorklund 1y ago
I would say gambling in itself isnt immoral. The problem is that a small % of people get addicted and end up spending all their money and more on betting. And that the industry makes almost all their profits on those that are addicted.
- keiferski 1y ago
  Sure, we could get into a discussion on the morality of gambling itself, but if we look at pretty much every global ethical tradition (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, etc.) it is frowned upon strongly. It seems to me like widespread gambling = negative social effects is a pretty widespread, obvious conclusion that most civilizations have reached. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling#Religious_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling#Religious_views
  - 1659447091 1y ago
    From the wiki page, Christianity from the bible's perspective doesn't have a problem with gambling itself: > Although the bible does not condemn gambling, instead the desire to get rich is called to account numerous times in the New Testament. And the Catholic's problem with it is the competition: > Some parish pastors have also opposed casinos for the additional reason that they would take customers away from church bingo and annual festivals where games such as blackjack, roulette, craps, and poker are used for fundraising.
    - keiferski 1y ago
      You left out the entire first half of the section on Catholicism, which is an extremely misleading move on your part: The Catholic Church holds the position that there is no moral impediment to gambling, so long as it is fair, all bettors have a reasonable chance of winning, there is no fraud involved, and the parties involved do not have actual knowledge of the outcome of the bet (unless they have disclosed this knowledge),[33] and as long as the following conditions are met: the gambler can afford to lose the bet, and stops when the limit is reached, and the motivation is entertainment and not personal gain leading to the "love of money"[34] or making a living. In general, Catholic bishops have opposed casino gambling on the grounds that it too often tempts people into problem gambling or addiction, and has particularly negative effects on poor people; they sometimes also cite secondary effects such as increases in loan sharking, prostitution, corruption, and general public immorality
Tangokat 1y ago
https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy In the author’s words, long degeneracy represents “a belief that the world will only get more degenerate, financialized, speculative, lonely, tribal and weird”. The most concise and holistic explanation of this trend is: "As real returns compress, risk increases to compensate".
- keiferski 1y ago
  Great post, thanks for linking to that. The prevalence of crypto millionaires is definitely a big factor. Especially for people under 35; when you see your peers becoming rich from essentially random behaviors (like buying the right coin), it really undermines the idea that success is linked to hard work. And that impression funnels back into culture.
  - deleted 1y ago
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- NoGravitas 1y ago
  I dislike the author's framing of this in terms of right-wing meme culture, but almost all of the analysis is nevertheless correct. An orthodox Marxist could make essentially the same argument using different terminology - except about the inevitability of the trend continuing forever.
  - estearum 1y ago
    > except about the inevitability of the trend continuing forever. Which is important because it yields completely different behavior from the believer...
- qlm 1y ago
  The combination of anime children, terms like "degeneracy", and crypto shilling is frankly extremely repellant.
  - 1y ago
shusaku 1y ago
> Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing. This is a neat moral message… but is it really true? Gambling is addictive, so the reality might be that even without such deep social problems you get similar levels
- hiatus 1y ago
  It can be a bit of both no? Drugs are addictive but drug use increases when conditions worsen.
- kqr 1y ago
  Brenner, Brenner, and Brown wrote A World of Chance in which they draw from large reams of data and conclude that gambling is often used by those that see no other way up.
- ls612 1y ago
  Gambling is addictive for some, in the same way that alcohol is addictive for some, yet blanket alcohol prohibition is not considered a great idea in hindsight.
  - byronic 1y ago
    I don't know how we could put limits on gambling that would make sense, though. There's a huge difference in bets that I used to make (which were all black-market sports bets, usually on 'game winner' or over/under) ~ once a week during the NFL season vs. the shit going on with FanDuel and all these phone-based gamified services. And that stuff absolutely encourages you to make bets that you can't afford and can easily turn into a problem even for someone who isn't 'addicted' per se -- it's like the predatory loot box model from video games. TLDR I don't know how you write a law that would put hard and fast limits on what can be bet on and how much an individual is allowed to bet during a week in a way that would be palatable to the companies. I'm in favor of the blanket ban at this point; the black market for betting has always existed and it was better than the current setup.
    - 1y ago
lapcat 1y ago
> you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich I don't think anyone is getting rich from sports betting. It's not like the lottery, where the jackpots are massive and the odds are very long. And the jackpots get massive in the lottery because they accumulate when nobody wins, whereas in sports bettings, the gambler always either wins or loses, based on the outcome of the sporting event; there's no carry-over.
- tpm 1y ago
  You are right customers are not getting rich from sports betting, but the true reason is that once 'the house', the betting company sees a consistent winner, it will ban them or lower their betting limit to discourage them from betting again. There are people that would get rich otherwise. Also betting companies are coordinating their odds to prevent arbitrage. And also, of course: there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich. And betting company owners too. But you didn't mean those.
  - lapcat 1y ago
    > There are people that would get rich otherwise. This is highly unlikely. Nobody has the magical ability to predict the outcome of sporting events. > there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich. This is highly unlikely for most of the things that Americans are gambling on, such as NFL games. > But you didn't mean those. It doesn't appear to be what the OP meant.
    - tpm 1y ago
      > This is highly unlikely. It is my experience from working in the sports betting industry for several years, including the risk reporting and risk managing part. In fact I'm pretty sure several people lived comfortable life by going around our risk management by using a loophole that was possible at the time in our country - it was possible to bet anonymously in person. So while we could limit maximum winnings per bet, we could not tie particular bets to persons, and they just placed several bets in different locations, or they used helpers. I'm not going into speculations how they acquired the knowledge. Some people are just nerds, others sit at the stadiums and place bets right from there etc., but I'm pretty confident there are customers who are able to make money on sport bets and are not fraudsters.
Simulacra 1y ago
I agree that it's 100% hope. And a little hope can be very bad. I once read an article about kidnapping, and the author stated that often kidnappers will reassure their victims that they will be let go, that everything will be all right, and that little bit of hope keeps the victim compliant. I think casinos do the same thing..
bdangubic 1y ago
> has the possibility of making your rich the core issue is that such possibility does not exist. if you are successful gambler to the point where you are on the path to riches you will be banned from all platforms faster than Jets are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs
- polio 1y ago
  In sports betting contexts, you're often just betting against other players, I believe. If they're anything like prediction markets, the exchange isn't going to care how successful you are, as long as you're betting.
  - estearum 1y ago
    They're not like prediction markets. They do exactly what GP says they do: if you win, you effectively get banned (max bet sizes shrunk toward $0). If you suck, they do the reverse and expand your max bet sizes and offer you loans. These things are so unfathomably antisocial that I earnestly believe every single politician who advances them should be (journalistically) investigated as extensively as is legally possible.
    - at-w 1y ago
      There are lots of places where you can bet against other players now. The older betting markets like Betfair are no longer available in the US, but Kalshi, Polymarket, and others now offer the same kind of two-sided marketplace in the US.
  - IncreasePosts 1y ago
    There is parimutuel betting, but the payouts change based on the final pool size
  - rurp 1y ago
    Not only do winning players get quickly banned like sibling said, the house take on the major platforms is vastly higher than with traditional sports betting.
thrance 1y ago
We already live in a country where owning capital generates more income than actually working. And this is rapidly getting worse. The GOP has sold the country on blaming minorities, and so things will get much, much worse before they can be better.
- throwaway2037 1y ago
  > We already live in a country The context is unclear. What country?
  - thrance 1y ago
    Know many countries with a political entiry known as "The GOP" that likes to blame minorities for everything wrong in society?
  - ta1243 1y ago
    Pretty much any country. If you have $1m in assets you can simply stick it in a passive fund and earn more than the average wage in the highest earning countries. You can certainly live like a king in low cost countries.
    - mercutio2 1y ago
      You’re either using nominal, not real, returns, or assuming that passive fund is taking on a lot of risk/recency bias. If you had said $2 million, I’d say that’s closer to accurate, although there’s still a conversation to be had about risk vs return.
      - ta1243 1y ago
        Over the last 30 years the s&p with reinvested dividends has returned an average 9%, so fine, $90k off $1m assets. Median wage in the USA is globally very high at just over $60k.
        mercutio2 1y ago
VoodooJuJu 1y ago
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darkhorse222 1y ago
My understanding is that a big appeal of sports gambling is that it adds stakes to entertainment. So instead of casually watching the game you're much more invested. Given this angle, I don't think the majority of casual sports betters are thinking about this in terms of getting rich. It just makes their frequent content more engaging.
alexashka 1y ago
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- gaindustries 1y ago
  They are 100% correct, I can tell you that with absolute certainty. There is not much to debate here.
- dpark 1y ago
  > Are you the arbiter of human morality? This kind of response is toxic to intelligent discussion. > people who don't know shit, don't know it and talk Hi, kettle.
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throw0101d 1y ago
> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better. Kyla Scanlon (?) coined the term "financial nihilism" to describe this feeling: * https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism She thinks it's why things like cryptocurrencies/BTC have taken off: it's a chance to 'hit the jackpot', as many folks don't see another way to (financial) success.
- stevenwoo 1y ago
  This cryptocurrency craze already happened in other places like South Korea where cryptocurrency user base is bigger and more active than the stock market, might be a glimpse at the future in the USA with SK's plummeting birth rate.
- adriand 1y ago
  I’m genuinely curious to what extent the hardships younger people face economically are related to wasting huge amounts of time on screens. The average Gen Z person spends nine hours per day on screens. The average 18-24 year old American spends more than three hours per day just on social media. I recognize all the various societal and structural factors that disadvantage younger people. At the same time, people have agency. When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same. It is, of course, not entirely fair to criticize younger people given that there are teams of psychologists working to make these products as addictive as possible. So perhaps we older people need to do something about it. Yes, I sound old AF: “kids, get off your phones and do something useful!” Yes, I say this to my own kids, with little discernible efficacy. But I honestly wonder what you all think of this. Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?
  - squigz 1y ago
    > When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same. So... you spent a lot of time in front of a screen, huh?
JumpinJack_Cash 1y ago
> > It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better On the contrary all epicenters of gambling are extremely rich areas populated by people who have mastered such art. The proximities of the stock exchanges of every country are basically the richest zip code in the country
- estearum 1y ago
  Stock exchanges are not themselves anything like a casino. You can bet within them in similar ways, but you can also make bets at a stock exchange that you would never find at a casino.
- dpark 1y ago
  > On the contrary all epicenters of gambling are extremely rich areas populated by people who have mastered such art. This does not seem to be a rebuttal. The “extremely rich areas” are generally funded by the not at all rich who lose their money gambling. Additionally most in the “extremely rich areas” are not actually wealthy. And there are many, many gambling areas that are not rich at all.
oreally 1y ago
I'd like to present a different perspective, abeit slightly radical. I believe that there's a place for a time-efficient, minimal human approval, risk-reward system for a society in which jobs have been gatekept to ever-higher requirements and are even harder to sustain due to pressures of the people gatekeeping you out and around you once you've gotten in (ie. the bureaucracies of your co-workers and your boss's temper tantrums). If you've ever talked to creative-passion professionals(ie. media-content, artists), clients don't really respect them and abuse their passion, plus the people around them put a lot of pressure on them. In addition, polishing their work takes up a lot of time. So it's highly probable that they would be stuck in this loop if they didn't do something. You could say 'oh, they can upskill themselves' or whatever. However that carries significant risk and still binds the individual to people's approvals and their hidden/overboard requirements. All the while, time and mental health is being sapped from them. I knew a programmer in gamedev who pivoted to robotics. It was all math heavy stuff and consumed him and his mental health to the point of his relationships suffering. Point is skills-pivoting is hard to execute, and gets riskier by the day (think ai and jobs). However, say there's a system that is easy to execute, but the rewards are variant. But if that individual is able to figure out a plan to generate positive expectancy, that's a great alternative to the system of 'get a job and another job and hope you tick the requirements'. It's like a business in which you fail until you don't. Of course, the keyword is being able to turn whatever you're doing into *positive expectancy*. Like a business with a new offering/venture, everything new looks like a gamble because you don't know the information, the theories and the outcome. Do you want really want to kill off these new businesses?
- keiferski 1y ago
  I think what you're saying is that society would benefit from a kind of lottery system that made it easy for people to earn a sizable amount of money randomly, without any sort of gatekeeping? I agree with the premise, however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
  - oreally 1y ago
    it's not really lottery, that system has to involve growing a 'skill' such that one could possibly get 'good' and 'rewarded' at it, and that 'skill' doesn't need human approval, which will make it a true alternative to getting jobs. bonus points if one can scale it up. Take daytrading for example, of the 99% who fail are they all gamblers or are they just tolerating enough failures until they get a positive expectancy? > however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system. Yea what I'm talking about isn't exactly a gambling system which will try to screw you over the instant you get some momentum of out a positive expectancy system.
DiscourseFan 1y ago
I mean hard work has never made anyone wealthy, it usually makes someone else wealthy. What makes you wealthy is being good at negotiation and intepersonal skills, family connections, and luck. And, of course, a touch or genius—there’s a reason that some of the wealthiest people in tech are also sometimes the most brilliant. Somebody who figures out and properly leverages a labor saving technique, even if it seems obvious afterwards, will become wealthy in most circumstances; someone who had their finger on the pulse of a market, whether it is art, fashion, or the S&P 500, can become wealthy by making the right investments and sales. But hard work? Nobody ever became wealthy by working in a coal mine 12 hours a day, nobody ever became wealthy spending hours and hours meticulously and painstakingly setting up a script that could’ve been prompted out in under 5 minutes. Wealth is something that always involves a level of risk and chance, that’s why sports betting is so enticing, because it operates on the same principles as the rest of the market, even though, clearly, like in a casino, the house always gets its cut. But there are many people who live comfortably just playing poker 3 to 4 times a week, and their wealth is no accident.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  I disagree. What a high level professional gambler is doing is hard work. Hard work doesn't make you rich, but it's part of the things that you need to prosper. I'm no inspirational poster child, but hard work, building a network, doing good things for people were all essential to my long term success. I didn't have the benefit of familial connections, but that helps too. There's a saying that you make your own luck, which is true... if you're not on the field, you can't get lucky. People making a living playing poker is fine, but it's just like being a working musician, an investor or an athlete. I had a friend who made a living on horse better. You've developed a set of skills and have a usually limited window to cash in on them. The 95% of people gambling aren't attracted to the game of skill, and flop around with the 101 things to do in a gambling establishment that aren't poker.
  - DiscourseFan 1y ago
    I agree that hard work is often a pre-requisite for being successful, but it is not key to being successful by any means. Like I wouldn't agree with your definition because most people wouldn't claim that, say, getting into bitcoin early and then working like 10 hours a week max trading and setting up mining rigs is "hard work," even if it made some people extremely wealthy, just because they got on the trend early.
Spooky23 1y ago
Gambling encourages and creates bad behavior. I got to hang out at a local state-licensed casino for a few nights due to a work obligation. Try it some time and people watch. At best, there's groups of people having a good time. Usually they seemed to be associated with music or convention activity. Mostly, it's depressing, with old people blowing their pensions on stupid slot machines. At worst, there's really obvious criminal activity with people washing money on table and poker games. The only gambling thing that I ever thought could be good was the state lottery bonds they have in the UK and Ireland. Basically, it's like a CD for lottery... you the interest is a prize pot. But your principal is still there. The online sports betting thing is gross. My son is 13, and many of the boys are totally enthralled with sports betting. We're creating addicts before they even earn money.
- Retr0id 1y ago
  What are the 13yos doing? Is there some fake-money sports betting platform or are they able to burn real money on it?
  - ineedasername 1y ago
    My son has mentioned friends whose fathers let them place bets. “Hey, who do you like for the wildcard game tonight, I’ll put a tenner ($10) on it for you.” It’s not seen the same way as a parent giving giving their kid alcohol or other age-gated things like that. Interestingly, considering the role that sports have in day to day social discourse & self-identity with teams (“we” need to win this game), I’ve heard a few acquaintances say basically “placing a bet makes watching it more interesting, it’s too boring otherwise”. And given the social/identity thing you can’t not watch it. “Hey you catch that play last night? ‘We’ fell apart, awful…” gotta be able to keep up with the tribe chants.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      When I was 13 my parents would let me have a (small) glass of wine with dinner. I'm sure many parents place proxy sports bets for their kids. Maybe to teach them how to use betting as a form of entertainment and learning how your money can also just disappear. I can see it being a good thing if done carefully. I can also see it going wrong.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better. I think this passes the buck. It's not the addictive apps and ads, it's society! Don't regulate us!
- brookst 1y ago
  It is possible to see both systemic and individual concerns. Binary thinking for blame or credit rarely makes sense in complex systems.
- linehedonist 1y ago
  Yeah I tend to agree with this. People have always bet on sports. Wodehouse wrote a story about bored rich guys in the countryside betting on children’s church games. The real question is, what has changed to allow this betting to occur legally?
screye 1y ago
It's not just gambling. Influencer and VC culture incentivize this same 'hit it big or die trying' ethos. I have seen '5 million is too little to retire on' type of messaging on HN too. The only way to save more than that is to take on an irrational amount of risk (ie. Gamble). For genZ, the squeeze comes from 3 sides. On one side, few professions promise long term stability. There is a feeling that the ground can vanish under your feet at any moment. (SWE jobs in particular are feeling this pressure). 2nd, Social media has raised the goalposts on the idea of a good life. Lastly, Nimbys and opaque healthcare policy have put the lowest (and most quantifiable) aspects of Maslow's pyramid out of reach. (Safety needs) Gambling is a symptom. Nowdays, people don't invest in good bonds because there is no such thing. Similarly, people don't invest in steady jobs because increasingly, there is no such thing. Housing reform, transparent healthcare and a small degree of worker protections would go a long way towards incentivizing stable decision making.
- nharada 1y ago
  I agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers. A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under 30 have looked at the trends over their lifetime and determined that their lives are going to have so much volatility they need a massive amount of money to weather the storm. [1] https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/gen-z-9-5-million-financially-successful-after-anxiously-watching-their-parents-unretire/ https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/gen-z-9-5-million-financially...
  - programjames 1y ago
    Shouldn't you expect Zoomers to be more than double millenials? They're 20 years younger, which means money is 4x cheaper.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Yes, I am not seeing any problem with the $10M figure, assuming one wants to insure against old age health expenses, insure against loss of income between age 50 and 70, and be able to to travel here and there between the age of 60 and 80. For a current 20 to 30 year old, they should expect SS benefits to come at a higher age, probably 72 or even 75, and whatever benefit amount they get will buy less than what it buys today. And they will have to shell out for better quality healthcare (i.e. a couple decades ago, they might have seen a doctor, but today, they see an NP/PA, and in a few more decades, they might not even get that). The big expense is insuring against loss of income between age 50 and whatever age government benefits start. Most people will never make their way up the income ladder again, so they need to make sure they have adequate savings by then, otherwise they are cooked, and those are the ages that healthcare expenses start adding up.
Vaslo 1y ago
Better said: people are lazy and would rather the quick buck than hard work
nonameiguess 1y ago
I think we have to caveat that we're all speculating here. I would assume there are studies of habitual gamblers, but since it was only nationally legalized a few years ago, there likely isn't a lot of recent research on regular people who weren't specifically seeking it out in the past. But just to say, having been a sports fan my entire life, as well as growing up with a grandmother that lived in Vegas, I bet a tiny bit myself but knew quite a few who bet a lot more, and it wasn't really like you're saying. Nobody expected to get rich. Hitting it big enough to make a meaningful impact on lifetime wealth requires parlays that are statistically just as unlikely as the actual lottery, at which point you may as well simply play the lottery, which was already available. Instead, sports bettors seemed to come in a few varieties. One is the analytically minded fans who just wanted to see if they could make some amount of predictable extra income. I fell into that category back in college and grad school and did consistently earn money, but a very small amount, in the four figures a year, less than you'd get working part-time at McDonald's. Another is the casual fan who just finds the games more entertaining if they have a personal stake. These are the kinds of people who participate in office super bowl pools and it's pretty innocuous. The problems start to happen when people from either of these groups has some kind of unforeseen financial problem, no other way to get money quickly, and figures they'll try something like throwing a bunch of money into a boxing match they think they can predict. Not get rich levels, but something like betting enough to hit a 50 grand payoff. It becomes a problem because one of two things happens. You succeed, but then you can't acknowledge the role of sheer luck, think you're smarter than you really are and can predict the future, and you keep doing it. Otherwise, you lose, but can't let it go and chase your losses to try and recoup them. Either way, you end up losing. The only way to win is get very lucky and then have the discipline to immediately quit, which almost no one has. But realistically, people have bet on sports as long as sports have existed, in every civilization we have a record of. It's hard to say it's reflective of any kind of specific social condition. It's a natural thing to do. Most bets are small and effectively just people throwing away money on a pointless purchase no more harmful than buying junk on Amazon they don't really need and will never use. It's becoming a problem because legalizing it gave the sports leagues and broadcasters themselves a financial incentive to market it. Every game and every analysis now includes ads and the pundits themselves giving their picks, making it appear to be an important part of being a fan than everyone should do. They took something that could have mostly been harmless and industrialized it. A whole lot of people who easily get addicted to anything addictive are now specifically getting addicted to this, simply because they can. It's problematic in exactly the same way alcohol sales are. The marketing industrial complex is making it seem like you're not a full human if you're not doing it, but if everyone is doing it, then the addicts are going to be doing it, too. At a small enough scale, it's still destroying a few lives, but it's like hoarding, rare and most people vaguely know it's out there somewhere but never think about it. If the most popular entertainers in the world, emblems of civic pride and identity, started running ads and on-air segments telling you that you should hoard and exactly how to do it, then we'd have a much larger scale problem. The problem we have as a country, though, is the court logic legalizing it couldn't have realistically been different. There is no sane way to justify having it be legal in Nevada but nowhere else. It should be legal nowhere, but then you're banning Las Vegas, and even if that's the right thing to do, we don't have a ton of precedent for doing that much harm to corporate bottom lines. It took 50 years of incontrovertible evidence to do it to tobacco. It'll probably happen eventually, but in the same way. We won't outright ban betting, but it will be heavily marketed against, socially stigmatized, and banned from advertising.
AfterHIA 1y ago
Bingo! Pun intended.
cyanydeez 1y ago
The immoral part is the grifters, not the suckers.
Eridrus 1y ago
Ah yes, gambling, a thing that has never before been popular.
- mind_orbit 1y ago
  Gambling was already very popular, but since the lockdown, the industry has grown exponentially. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391887687_The_Strategic_Use_of_AI_in_Casino_Game_Development_and_Maтagement https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391887687_The_Strat... - the research contains figures and forecasts for the next few years - and they’re quite impressive
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Lotteries and crowdfunding medical bills are similar. Predatory exploitation of magical thinking as substitutes for addressing causes and conditions that lead to desperation, deprivation, and hopeless circumstances. Cryptocurrencies also partially fit this category being semi-pyramid schemes, but have intrinsic advantages to hide criminal activity and for tax evasion in addition to their privacy-protecting properties for legitimate transactions.

dist-epoch 1y ago

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ayatollah 1y ago
The stock market is gambling only for fools, while sports betting is gambling for everyone. False equivalence.
- swarnie 1y ago
  It really depends how you use it. Put your 401k in to a global index and come back in 45 years? Yeah that's a false equivalence. Take out a bank loan and roll 0DTE options? That's 99% the same as sports gambling for me.
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keiferski 1y ago
That's a completely false equivalence, and an uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote.
d4mi3n 1y ago
Let's keep this conversation productive. I don't read OP's comment anything like your response seems to imply. While I don't think OP's point about morals is relevant here (they vary widely from culture to culture), equating the stock market to gambling misses out on a lot of nuance. Your average 401k retirement fund is going to outperform your average gambler 100% of the time over one's lifetime. Long term investments also tend to not prey on addictive patterns of behavior. I personally think for a society to function well, it behooves ourselves to recognize when there are certain patterns or behaviors that are self destructive if left unchecked. I feel addictive drugs and gambling fall into this category. That's not to say banning this behavior is the right call, but there's a lot of space to explore productive policies between full on bans and anything-goes.

roenxi 1y ago

> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better. Broadly speaking I probably agree with their conclusion. But they really should consider savings and investment before donating their money to a betting website - it is pretty much the only choice that is guaranteed to not make their lives better in any way. I can hazard a guess as to the major reason their life isn't improving, they aren't doing anything to make it better. The money supply generally grows at >5% annually in most English speaking countries, find a way to get a slice of that action if nothing else. If they really can't think of something to do with the money, give it to a friend. Then at least maybe there is some social capital for a rainy day.

keiferski 1y ago
The vast, vast majority of people that have gambling problems aren't making rational financial decisions like this. They're doing a habitual activity that is reinforced by bad actors trying to extract as much money from them as possible. This is especially noticeable with "traditional" offline gambling and lotteries - lower income people play them habitually from a kind of learned helplessness, not as a rational financial strategy. https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/lottery-tickets-poor-rich-income-powerball-mega-millions-jackpot-odds-les-bernal-stop-predatory-gambling/ https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/lottery-tickets-poor-rich-inc...
- roenxi 1y ago
  Sure, seems likely in a lot of cases. But if the starting point is talking about someone who makes chronically irrational decisions then life is going to seem a bit hopeless. The issue isn't as much they're giving up as it is that they aren't making rational decisions. Thread ancestor was saying "Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing". And I think that the problem here is that the people involved couldn't climb the ladder if you put their hands on it. To climb the ladder of success requires the grip of a rational actor. If someone is gambling then the #1 problem is not the system in itself, but the fact that for whatever reason they don't understand the concept of investment at a fundamental level. Can't help that person by changing gambling policies around. If they aren't going to invest themselves, then at the end of the day they are always going to be dependent on the charity of someone who will, whether they irrationally waste their money on gambling or some other vice.

victorbjorklund 1y ago

I would say gambling in itself isnt immoral. The problem is that a small % of people get addicted and end up spending all their money and more on betting. And that the industry makes almost all their profits on those that are addicted.

keiferski 1y ago
Sure, we could get into a discussion on the morality of gambling itself, but if we look at pretty much every global ethical tradition (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, etc.) it is frowned upon strongly. It seems to me like widespread gambling = negative social effects is a pretty widespread, obvious conclusion that most civilizations have reached. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling#Religious_views https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling#Religious_views
- 1659447091 1y ago
  From the wiki page, Christianity from the bible's perspective doesn't have a problem with gambling itself: > Although the bible does not condemn gambling, instead the desire to get rich is called to account numerous times in the New Testament. And the Catholic's problem with it is the competition: > Some parish pastors have also opposed casinos for the additional reason that they would take customers away from church bingo and annual festivals where games such as blackjack, roulette, craps, and poker are used for fundraising.
  - keiferski 1y ago
    You left out the entire first half of the section on Catholicism, which is an extremely misleading move on your part: The Catholic Church holds the position that there is no moral impediment to gambling, so long as it is fair, all bettors have a reasonable chance of winning, there is no fraud involved, and the parties involved do not have actual knowledge of the outcome of the bet (unless they have disclosed this knowledge),[33] and as long as the following conditions are met: the gambler can afford to lose the bet, and stops when the limit is reached, and the motivation is entertainment and not personal gain leading to the "love of money"[34] or making a living. In general, Catholic bishops have opposed casino gambling on the grounds that it too often tempts people into problem gambling or addiction, and has particularly negative effects on poor people; they sometimes also cite secondary effects such as increases in loan sharking, prostitution, corruption, and general public immorality

Tangokat 1y ago

https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy In the author’s words, long degeneracy represents “a belief that the world will only get more degenerate, financialized, speculative, lonely, tribal and weird”. The most concise and holistic explanation of this trend is: "As real returns compress, risk increases to compensate".

keiferski 1y ago
Great post, thanks for linking to that. The prevalence of crypto millionaires is definitely a big factor. Especially for people under 35; when you see your peers becoming rich from essentially random behaviors (like buying the right coin), it really undermines the idea that success is linked to hard work. And that impression funnels back into culture.
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NoGravitas 1y ago
I dislike the author's framing of this in terms of right-wing meme culture, but almost all of the analysis is nevertheless correct. An orthodox Marxist could make essentially the same argument using different terminology - except about the inevitability of the trend continuing forever.
- estearum 1y ago
  > except about the inevitability of the trend continuing forever. Which is important because it yields completely different behavior from the believer...
qlm 1y ago
The combination of anime children, terms like "degeneracy", and crypto shilling is frankly extremely repellant.
- 1y ago

shusaku 1y ago

> Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing. This is a neat moral message… but is it really true? Gambling is addictive, so the reality might be that even without such deep social problems you get similar levels

hiatus 1y ago
It can be a bit of both no? Drugs are addictive but drug use increases when conditions worsen.
kqr 1y ago
Brenner, Brenner, and Brown wrote A World of Chance in which they draw from large reams of data and conclude that gambling is often used by those that see no other way up.
ls612 1y ago
Gambling is addictive for some, in the same way that alcohol is addictive for some, yet blanket alcohol prohibition is not considered a great idea in hindsight.
- byronic 1y ago
  I don't know how we could put limits on gambling that would make sense, though. There's a huge difference in bets that I used to make (which were all black-market sports bets, usually on 'game winner' or over/under) ~ once a week during the NFL season vs. the shit going on with FanDuel and all these phone-based gamified services. And that stuff absolutely encourages you to make bets that you can't afford and can easily turn into a problem even for someone who isn't 'addicted' per se -- it's like the predatory loot box model from video games. TLDR I don't know how you write a law that would put hard and fast limits on what can be bet on and how much an individual is allowed to bet during a week in a way that would be palatable to the companies. I'm in favor of the blanket ban at this point; the black market for betting has always existed and it was better than the current setup.
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lapcat 1y ago

> you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich I don't think anyone is getting rich from sports betting. It's not like the lottery, where the jackpots are massive and the odds are very long. And the jackpots get massive in the lottery because they accumulate when nobody wins, whereas in sports bettings, the gambler always either wins or loses, based on the outcome of the sporting event; there's no carry-over.

tpm 1y ago
You are right customers are not getting rich from sports betting, but the true reason is that once 'the house', the betting company sees a consistent winner, it will ban them or lower their betting limit to discourage them from betting again. There are people that would get rich otherwise. Also betting companies are coordinating their odds to prevent arbitrage. And also, of course: there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich. And betting company owners too. But you didn't mean those.
- lapcat 1y ago
  > There are people that would get rich otherwise. This is highly unlikely. Nobody has the magical ability to predict the outcome of sporting events. > there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich. This is highly unlikely for most of the things that Americans are gambling on, such as NFL games. > But you didn't mean those. It doesn't appear to be what the OP meant.
  - tpm 1y ago
    > This is highly unlikely. It is my experience from working in the sports betting industry for several years, including the risk reporting and risk managing part. In fact I'm pretty sure several people lived comfortable life by going around our risk management by using a loophole that was possible at the time in our country - it was possible to bet anonymously in person. So while we could limit maximum winnings per bet, we could not tie particular bets to persons, and they just placed several bets in different locations, or they used helpers. I'm not going into speculations how they acquired the knowledge. Some people are just nerds, others sit at the stadiums and place bets right from there etc., but I'm pretty confident there are customers who are able to make money on sport bets and are not fraudsters.

Simulacra 1y ago

I agree that it's 100% hope. And a little hope can be very bad. I once read an article about kidnapping, and the author stated that often kidnappers will reassure their victims that they will be let go, that everything will be all right, and that little bit of hope keeps the victim compliant. I think casinos do the same thing..

bdangubic 1y ago

> has the possibility of making your rich the core issue is that such possibility does not exist. if you are successful gambler to the point where you are on the path to riches you will be banned from all platforms faster than Jets are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs

polio 1y ago
In sports betting contexts, you're often just betting against other players, I believe. If they're anything like prediction markets, the exchange isn't going to care how successful you are, as long as you're betting.
- estearum 1y ago
  They're not like prediction markets. They do exactly what GP says they do: if you win, you effectively get banned (max bet sizes shrunk toward $0). If you suck, they do the reverse and expand your max bet sizes and offer you loans. These things are so unfathomably antisocial that I earnestly believe every single politician who advances them should be (journalistically) investigated as extensively as is legally possible.
  - at-w 1y ago
    There are lots of places where you can bet against other players now. The older betting markets like Betfair are no longer available in the US, but Kalshi, Polymarket, and others now offer the same kind of two-sided marketplace in the US.
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  There is parimutuel betting, but the payouts change based on the final pool size
- rurp 1y ago
  Not only do winning players get quickly banned like sibling said, the house take on the major platforms is vastly higher than with traditional sports betting.

thrance 1y ago

We already live in a country where owning capital generates more income than actually working. And this is rapidly getting worse. The GOP has sold the country on blaming minorities, and so things will get much, much worse before they can be better.

throwaway2037 1y ago
> We already live in a country The context is unclear. What country?
- thrance 1y ago
  Know many countries with a political entiry known as "The GOP" that likes to blame minorities for everything wrong in society?
- ta1243 1y ago
  Pretty much any country. If you have $1m in assets you can simply stick it in a passive fund and earn more than the average wage in the highest earning countries. You can certainly live like a king in low cost countries.
  - mercutio2 1y ago
    You’re either using nominal, not real, returns, or assuming that passive fund is taking on a lot of risk/recency bias. If you had said $2 million, I’d say that’s closer to accurate, although there’s still a conversation to be had about risk vs return.
    - ta1243 1y ago
      Over the last 30 years the s&p with reinvested dividends has returned an average 9%, so fine, $90k off $1m assets. Median wage in the USA is globally very high at just over $60k.
      - mercutio2 1y ago

VoodooJuJu 1y ago

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darkhorse222 1y ago

My understanding is that a big appeal of sports gambling is that it adds stakes to entertainment. So instead of casually watching the game you're much more invested. Given this angle, I don't think the majority of casual sports betters are thinking about this in terms of getting rich. It just makes their frequent content more engaging.

alexashka 1y ago

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gaindustries 1y ago
They are 100% correct, I can tell you that with absolute certainty. There is not much to debate here.
dpark 1y ago
> Are you the arbiter of human morality? This kind of response is toxic to intelligent discussion. > people who don't know shit, don't know it and talk Hi, kettle.
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throw0101d 1y ago

> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better. Kyla Scanlon (?) coined the term "financial nihilism" to describe this feeling: * https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism She thinks it's why things like cryptocurrencies/BTC have taken off: it's a chance to 'hit the jackpot', as many folks don't see another way to (financial) success.

stevenwoo 1y ago
This cryptocurrency craze already happened in other places like South Korea where cryptocurrency user base is bigger and more active than the stock market, might be a glimpse at the future in the USA with SK's plummeting birth rate.
adriand 1y ago
I’m genuinely curious to what extent the hardships younger people face economically are related to wasting huge amounts of time on screens. The average Gen Z person spends nine hours per day on screens. The average 18-24 year old American spends more than three hours per day just on social media. I recognize all the various societal and structural factors that disadvantage younger people. At the same time, people have agency. When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same. It is, of course, not entirely fair to criticize younger people given that there are teams of psychologists working to make these products as addictive as possible. So perhaps we older people need to do something about it. Yes, I sound old AF: “kids, get off your phones and do something useful!” Yes, I say this to my own kids, with little discernible efficacy. But I honestly wonder what you all think of this. Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?
- squigz 1y ago
  > When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same. So... you spent a lot of time in front of a screen, huh?

JumpinJack_Cash 1y ago

> > It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better On the contrary all epicenters of gambling are extremely rich areas populated by people who have mastered such art. The proximities of the stock exchanges of every country are basically the richest zip code in the country

estearum 1y ago
Stock exchanges are not themselves anything like a casino. You can bet within them in similar ways, but you can also make bets at a stock exchange that you would never find at a casino.
dpark 1y ago
> On the contrary all epicenters of gambling are extremely rich areas populated by people who have mastered such art. This does not seem to be a rebuttal. The “extremely rich areas” are generally funded by the not at all rich who lose their money gambling. Additionally most in the “extremely rich areas” are not actually wealthy. And there are many, many gambling areas that are not rich at all.

oreally 1y ago

I'd like to present a different perspective, abeit slightly radical. I believe that there's a place for a time-efficient, minimal human approval, risk-reward system for a society in which jobs have been gatekept to ever-higher requirements and are even harder to sustain due to pressures of the people gatekeeping you out and around you once you've gotten in (ie. the bureaucracies of your co-workers and your boss's temper tantrums). If you've ever talked to creative-passion professionals(ie. media-content, artists), clients don't really respect them and abuse their passion, plus the people around them put a lot of pressure on them. In addition, polishing their work takes up a lot of time. So it's highly probable that they would be stuck in this loop if they didn't do something. You could say 'oh, they can upskill themselves' or whatever. However that carries significant risk and still binds the individual to people's approvals and their hidden/overboard requirements. All the while, time and mental health is being sapped from them. I knew a programmer in gamedev who pivoted to robotics. It was all math heavy stuff and consumed him and his mental health to the point of his relationships suffering. Point is skills-pivoting is hard to execute, and gets riskier by the day (think ai and jobs). However, say there's a system that is easy to execute, but the rewards are variant. But if that individual is able to figure out a plan to generate positive expectancy, that's a great alternative to the system of 'get a job and another job and hope you tick the requirements'. It's like a business in which you fail until you don't. Of course, the keyword is being able to turn whatever you're doing into *positive expectancy*. Like a business with a new offering/venture, everything new looks like a gamble because you don't know the information, the theories and the outcome. Do you want really want to kill off these new businesses?

keiferski 1y ago
I think what you're saying is that society would benefit from a kind of lottery system that made it easy for people to earn a sizable amount of money randomly, without any sort of gatekeeping? I agree with the premise, however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
- oreally 1y ago
  it's not really lottery, that system has to involve growing a 'skill' such that one could possibly get 'good' and 'rewarded' at it, and that 'skill' doesn't need human approval, which will make it a true alternative to getting jobs. bonus points if one can scale it up. Take daytrading for example, of the 99% who fail are they all gamblers or are they just tolerating enough failures until they get a positive expectancy? > however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system. Yea what I'm talking about isn't exactly a gambling system which will try to screw you over the instant you get some momentum of out a positive expectancy system.

DiscourseFan 1y ago

I mean hard work has never made anyone wealthy, it usually makes someone else wealthy. What makes you wealthy is being good at negotiation and intepersonal skills, family connections, and luck. And, of course, a touch or genius—there’s a reason that some of the wealthiest people in tech are also sometimes the most brilliant. Somebody who figures out and properly leverages a labor saving technique, even if it seems obvious afterwards, will become wealthy in most circumstances; someone who had their finger on the pulse of a market, whether it is art, fashion, or the S&P 500, can become wealthy by making the right investments and sales. But hard work? Nobody ever became wealthy by working in a coal mine 12 hours a day, nobody ever became wealthy spending hours and hours meticulously and painstakingly setting up a script that could’ve been prompted out in under 5 minutes. Wealth is something that always involves a level of risk and chance, that’s why sports betting is so enticing, because it operates on the same principles as the rest of the market, even though, clearly, like in a casino, the house always gets its cut. But there are many people who live comfortably just playing poker 3 to 4 times a week, and their wealth is no accident.

Spooky23 1y ago
I disagree. What a high level professional gambler is doing is hard work. Hard work doesn't make you rich, but it's part of the things that you need to prosper. I'm no inspirational poster child, but hard work, building a network, doing good things for people were all essential to my long term success. I didn't have the benefit of familial connections, but that helps too. There's a saying that you make your own luck, which is true... if you're not on the field, you can't get lucky. People making a living playing poker is fine, but it's just like being a working musician, an investor or an athlete. I had a friend who made a living on horse better. You've developed a set of skills and have a usually limited window to cash in on them. The 95% of people gambling aren't attracted to the game of skill, and flop around with the 101 things to do in a gambling establishment that aren't poker.
- DiscourseFan 1y ago
  I agree that hard work is often a pre-requisite for being successful, but it is not key to being successful by any means. Like I wouldn't agree with your definition because most people wouldn't claim that, say, getting into bitcoin early and then working like 10 hours a week max trading and setting up mining rigs is "hard work," even if it made some people extremely wealthy, just because they got on the trend early.

Spooky23 1y ago

Gambling encourages and creates bad behavior. I got to hang out at a local state-licensed casino for a few nights due to a work obligation. Try it some time and people watch. At best, there's groups of people having a good time. Usually they seemed to be associated with music or convention activity. Mostly, it's depressing, with old people blowing their pensions on stupid slot machines. At worst, there's really obvious criminal activity with people washing money on table and poker games. The only gambling thing that I ever thought could be good was the state lottery bonds they have in the UK and Ireland. Basically, it's like a CD for lottery... you the interest is a prize pot. But your principal is still there. The online sports betting thing is gross. My son is 13, and many of the boys are totally enthralled with sports betting. We're creating addicts before they even earn money.

Retr0id 1y ago
What are the 13yos doing? Is there some fake-money sports betting platform or are they able to burn real money on it?
- ineedasername 1y ago
  My son has mentioned friends whose fathers let them place bets. “Hey, who do you like for the wildcard game tonight, I’ll put a tenner ($10) on it for you.” It’s not seen the same way as a parent giving giving their kid alcohol or other age-gated things like that. Interestingly, considering the role that sports have in day to day social discourse & self-identity with teams (“we” need to win this game), I’ve heard a few acquaintances say basically “placing a bet makes watching it more interesting, it’s too boring otherwise”. And given the social/identity thing you can’t not watch it. “Hey you catch that play last night? ‘We’ fell apart, awful…” gotta be able to keep up with the tribe chants.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    When I was 13 my parents would let me have a (small) glass of wine with dinner. I'm sure many parents place proxy sports bets for their kids. Maybe to teach them how to use betting as a form of entertainment and learning how your money can also just disappear. I can see it being a good thing if done carefully. I can also see it going wrong.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better. I think this passes the buck. It's not the addictive apps and ads, it's society! Don't regulate us!

brookst 1y ago
It is possible to see both systemic and individual concerns. Binary thinking for blame or credit rarely makes sense in complex systems.
linehedonist 1y ago
Yeah I tend to agree with this. People have always bet on sports. Wodehouse wrote a story about bored rich guys in the countryside betting on children’s church games. The real question is, what has changed to allow this betting to occur legally?

screye 1y ago

It's not just gambling. Influencer and VC culture incentivize this same 'hit it big or die trying' ethos. I have seen '5 million is too little to retire on' type of messaging on HN too. The only way to save more than that is to take on an irrational amount of risk (ie. Gamble). For genZ, the squeeze comes from 3 sides. On one side, few professions promise long term stability. There is a feeling that the ground can vanish under your feet at any moment. (SWE jobs in particular are feeling this pressure). 2nd, Social media has raised the goalposts on the idea of a good life. Lastly, Nimbys and opaque healthcare policy have put the lowest (and most quantifiable) aspects of Maslow's pyramid out of reach. (Safety needs) Gambling is a symptom. Nowdays, people don't invest in good bonds because there is no such thing. Similarly, people don't invest in steady jobs because increasingly, there is no such thing. Housing reform, transparent healthcare and a small degree of worker protections would go a long way towards incentivizing stable decision making.

nharada 1y ago
I agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers. A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under 30 have looked at the trends over their lifetime and determined that their lives are going to have so much volatility they need a massive amount of money to weather the storm. [1] https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/gen-z-9-5-million-financially-successful-after-anxiously-watching-their-parents-unretire/ https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/gen-z-9-5-million-financially...
- programjames 1y ago
  Shouldn't you expect Zoomers to be more than double millenials? They're 20 years younger, which means money is 4x cheaper.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Yes, I am not seeing any problem with the $10M figure, assuming one wants to insure against old age health expenses, insure against loss of income between age 50 and 70, and be able to to travel here and there between the age of 60 and 80. For a current 20 to 30 year old, they should expect SS benefits to come at a higher age, probably 72 or even 75, and whatever benefit amount they get will buy less than what it buys today. And they will have to shell out for better quality healthcare (i.e. a couple decades ago, they might have seen a doctor, but today, they see an NP/PA, and in a few more decades, they might not even get that). The big expense is insuring against loss of income between age 50 and whatever age government benefits start. Most people will never make their way up the income ladder again, so they need to make sure they have adequate savings by then, otherwise they are cooked, and those are the ages that healthcare expenses start adding up.

Vaslo 1y ago

Better said: people are lazy and would rather the quick buck than hard work

nonameiguess 1y ago

I think we have to caveat that we're all speculating here. I would assume there are studies of habitual gamblers, but since it was only nationally legalized a few years ago, there likely isn't a lot of recent research on regular people who weren't specifically seeking it out in the past. But just to say, having been a sports fan my entire life, as well as growing up with a grandmother that lived in Vegas, I bet a tiny bit myself but knew quite a few who bet a lot more, and it wasn't really like you're saying. Nobody expected to get rich. Hitting it big enough to make a meaningful impact on lifetime wealth requires parlays that are statistically just as unlikely as the actual lottery, at which point you may as well simply play the lottery, which was already available. Instead, sports bettors seemed to come in a few varieties. One is the analytically minded fans who just wanted to see if they could make some amount of predictable extra income. I fell into that category back in college and grad school and did consistently earn money, but a very small amount, in the four figures a year, less than you'd get working part-time at McDonald's. Another is the casual fan who just finds the games more entertaining if they have a personal stake. These are the kinds of people who participate in office super bowl pools and it's pretty innocuous. The problems start to happen when people from either of these groups has some kind of unforeseen financial problem, no other way to get money quickly, and figures they'll try something like throwing a bunch of money into a boxing match they think they can predict. Not get rich levels, but something like betting enough to hit a 50 grand payoff. It becomes a problem because one of two things happens. You succeed, but then you can't acknowledge the role of sheer luck, think you're smarter than you really are and can predict the future, and you keep doing it. Otherwise, you lose, but can't let it go and chase your losses to try and recoup them. Either way, you end up losing. The only way to win is get very lucky and then have the discipline to immediately quit, which almost no one has. But realistically, people have bet on sports as long as sports have existed, in every civilization we have a record of. It's hard to say it's reflective of any kind of specific social condition. It's a natural thing to do. Most bets are small and effectively just people throwing away money on a pointless purchase no more harmful than buying junk on Amazon they don't really need and will never use. It's becoming a problem because legalizing it gave the sports leagues and broadcasters themselves a financial incentive to market it. Every game and every analysis now includes ads and the pundits themselves giving their picks, making it appear to be an important part of being a fan than everyone should do. They took something that could have mostly been harmless and industrialized it. A whole lot of people who easily get addicted to anything addictive are now specifically getting addicted to this, simply because they can. It's problematic in exactly the same way alcohol sales are. The marketing industrial complex is making it seem like you're not a full human if you're not doing it, but if everyone is doing it, then the addicts are going to be doing it, too. At a small enough scale, it's still destroying a few lives, but it's like hoarding, rare and most people vaguely know it's out there somewhere but never think about it. If the most popular entertainers in the world, emblems of civic pride and identity, started running ads and on-air segments telling you that you should hoard and exactly how to do it, then we'd have a much larger scale problem. The problem we have as a country, though, is the court logic legalizing it couldn't have realistically been different. There is no sane way to justify having it be legal in Nevada but nowhere else. It should be legal nowhere, but then you're banning Las Vegas, and even if that's the right thing to do, we don't have a ton of precedent for doing that much harm to corporate bottom lines. It took 50 years of incontrovertible evidence to do it to tobacco. It'll probably happen eventually, but in the same way. We won't outright ban betting, but it will be heavily marketed against, socially stigmatized, and banned from advertising.

AfterHIA 1y ago

Bingo! Pun intended.

cyanydeez 1y ago

The immoral part is the grifters, not the suckers.

Eridrus 1y ago

Ah yes, gambling, a thing that has never before been popular.

mind_orbit 1y ago
Gambling was already very popular, but since the lockdown, the industry has grown exponentially. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391887687_The_Strategic_Use_of_AI_in_Casino_Game_Development_and_Maтagement https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391887687_The_Strat... - the research contains figures and forecasts for the next few years - and they’re quite impressive

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Lotteries and crowdfunding medical bills are similar. Predatory exploitation of magical thinking as substitutes for addressing causes and conditions that lead to desperation, deprivation, and hopeless circumstances. Cryptocurrencies also partially fit this category being semi-pyramid schemes, but have intrinsic advantages to hide criminal activity and for tax evasion in addition to their privacy-protecting properties for legitimate transactions.