There is a market for the gamblification of everything because there is no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future. A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.
That perception bears almost no relation to reality. The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Building wealth through real estate is also still totally possible outside of the HCOL metro areas. Try unfashionable areas like Cleveland or Oklahoma City. And let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places: the actual economic data on median income to housing price ratios tells another story.
Just start a small business, or build wealth through real estate is a take that indicates some severe divorce from the reality of poverty in America.
You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to).
Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up.
This runs counter to your internal narrative as a self made person I’m sure, but have you ever worked for 40 hours a week and not had anything left after paying for your share of rent, food and utilities? This is the reality that doesn’t seep into forums like this, where the majority is wealthy, college educated, and broadly privileged in some way either through exceptional talent or background.
> let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places
I will bite - homeownership is indeed higher in the rust belt, but many folks struggle to find jobs that meet the median without giving up their health and bodies, if they can find steady work at all.
Upward mobility still occurs in the US, at all levels. While the advice is difficult, almost impossible, for most to apply, it is sometimes applicable.
One of the main issues is that a lot of advice is presented as an unconditional, absolute guarantee to success. A college degree was never a guarantee of future success (contrary to great-grandparent's assertion), but the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless. Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people, but even for poorer individuals, it is possible to start, say, a cleaning service with very little assets. (At the same time, such businesses are unlikely to make a whole lot of money at the end, but you might be able to move from working class to middle class, e.g.). A lot of contractor businesses--your plumbers and the like--are going to be from the lower middle class or middle class, and you can make some good money there, although that is also likely to be at the cost of your health much sooner than you expect.
> Upward mobility still occurs in the US, at all levels.
This is not a super relevant statement as it can be made with a single example - the rate of mobility is down relative to when those who'd give the advice experienced (which has been compounding for at least the last 30 years, some say since the 1970s).
> the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless
Social segregation also plays a really important role too, and cross class relationships have plummeted - as someone who is doing well but didn't go to college, the relationship building in college is a factor that will work against me my entire life.
I would never say that upward mobility is impossible, or that its not worth it to strive for it. I am saying that dismissing headwinds due to no guarantee of success doesn't really take into account severely constrained actual access to opportunity that continues to become more constrained over time.
> Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people
Ah right, after a 14 hour shift you've left your car half way as that was how far she could take you. You are now on your knees with the god of all migraines, around you are small mountains of laundry as you fail to repair the washing machine while your ramen gets cold. Your mind locked in a loop, if I pay this bill how will I buy food, I need to pay this bill, I need to buy food. Then POOF suddenly it strikes you that you could start your own business. Adrenaline rushes though your veins. The whole business lasts about 20 seconds before you wake up in the laundry, shit what time is it, fk I have to walk to work.
If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable. And yet on Saturday at the neighborhood Independence Day party I met a guy who immigrated from Ukraine about 25 years ago with no money, no college education, no family support, and no English language skills. Instead of complaining he just went to work and while not exactly wealthy he's now doing fairly well as an electrical contractor.
Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different.
> you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable
I think this starts to make an inferred narrative about how failure is inevitable and that its excessive complaining, when there is large amounts of data showing how it is genuinely more difficult.
Just your Ukrainian example, it was cheaper to live 25 years ago, the cost of college has gone up ~180%. Since 2001 incomes have gone up 64% while housing has gone up 136%, healthcare up 180%, food up 100% and transportation up 120%. Thats a different playing field.
The point being made isn't that failure has any inevitability. Most people will be able to make it work enough to live, and those who can't due to choices, trauma, disability, drug use, or excessive bad luck are the homeless people you see begging on freeway offramps and intersections. At the economy level its a numbers game. It will never be impossible to make it big, in the same way that some people with every single advantage will end up on the street without a penny.
Rule of thumb for survival vs sober reality. nradov provides the mindset needed to survive, you provide the wisdom of risks and challenges to be aware of.
Today a dreaming Ukrainian is quite likely to instead get ripped away by conscription kidnapping teams and used as cannon fodder on the front, and not even make it to America. The reality changes but the rule of thumb is still good, you do the best with what you have and make yourself ready for opportunity you might not ever get.
Or you can think differently, 4 families can buy a 1 acre land plot, 5 or 6 children and a couple dads then start building a modest house (maybe 1200sqft) and then resell the entire thing in about a year for 4 times the land-only price. Suddenly 4 families that were making 25k each per year have $1.3m from some tiny plot they bought in the Santa Cruz mountains. Then they do it again and again and again. This is LITERALLY not even that hard to do today.
> you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable.
Exactly! This is the mind set. So tell me, how do you progress when you are there?
Or even better, now that we've accumulated many people conditioned by streaks of failure, how do we maximize their productivity and tax revenue? Should be an easy question for you :)
This is why immigrants are often the most exemplar people of the American Dream today. Most of the people today pushing socialist or communist agendas are not these immigrants, but instead children of very wealthy company owners that only saw a downward trend from their parent's trajectory. It's from that privileged that they found fighting for other people their cause. However it's misguided and they don't even understand this. They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world. And they don't understand that most people just want a meaningful job, not handouts and not free stuff. Meanwhile these people just keep pushing it to college students and the cycle continues. No matter how many times you tell them that it hasn't worked before they always respond with well it hasn't been done "right", and even current attempts in the United States are causing nearly unlimited fraud, they won't listen. The current philosophy of these people is to break the United States so badly that the only trajectory could be up. It's almost like they're seeing their own failures as people and want to replicate it for the country. Stop treating everyone as a victim, stop being a victim and you'll see the world shine.
> And they don't understand that most people just want a meaningful job, not handouts and not free stuff.
Wanting my tax dollars to go to children who can’t access food is not begging for a handout - you’re repeating middle school Republican propaganda at this point.
I’m a success story, but unlike you I’ve developed some empathy for the very real cycle of poverty I myself got out of, instead of the jingoistic “just create value”.
> They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world.
This is exactly how I feel about your ideology - that if only people would stop being a victim and think outside the box instead of complaining then they would see a better world. You’ve never dealt with disability or not being able bodied, you don’t see the value in anything other than what makes money.
There’s a spec of truth in it - some people turn their minds off and think of themselves as victims. I think of myself as a survivor, and a lucky one at that. I’ve overcome a lot and I can see where if many things outside of my control went the other way I could be dead right now. Wanting the path to be more clear for the next person is exactly the “see the world shine” that you advocate for.
We have the highest concentration of wealth ever in this country, because that’s what this system produces right now. Has it improved the world for the average person or made it worse?
Most socialists and communists have an ideological blind spot in that they don't understand how to create any wealth in the first place. Based on their policy proposals they implicitly seem to believe that the means of production just appear from somewhere, like a gift from a benevolent parent. And that wealth can be redistributed based on ideological whims without destroying it — or without preventing it from being created in the first place. This is an example of magical thinking.
I don't know what you mean, I mean I made a million dollars with only a small hundred million dollar loan from my dad! This sort of entrepreneurship is available to anyone in America.¹
how so? because people don't like when you move into their area and buy your way into everything? Displacing the people around? The "artisanal farmer" with 100M cap investment into gear.
People who don't shun and humiliate these silverspooners are more damaging than the gambling.
“Building wealth through real estate” should not be possible, and it’s half the reason we’re in this mess: people treating their homes as a store of wealth and blocking new construction to protect the value of their investment has locked young people out of the housing market. Hence all the gambling.
What you should be hoping is that YIMBY policies carry the day in the end and “building wealth through real estate” is eliminated as a thing.
Construction companies can still turn a profit building and selling them. The idea is that houses should be depreciating assets, like cars. If houses are appreciating in value it means you're not building enough of them.
Most houses do depreciate, or they require frequent expenses just to maintain their value which amounts to the same thing. There are occasionally exceptions to this rule in times of rapid construction price inflation but that's rare.
It's the land under the house that typically appreciates. Land is unlikely to depreciate unless the broader regional economy declines.
By people paying for houses they actually want to live in?
Real estate as "investment" is not helping anything here; it hurts home availability, first because prospective homeowners have to compete with capital that just wants to use those as store of value/for rentseeking (driving up demand/prices) and secondly because this creates incentives against building more houses (because that hurts those real estate "investors").
> The most reliable path to building a modicum of wealth has remained the same for generations: start a small business in some boring field and work your ass off for 80 hrs/wk.
Hardly. My grandfather was working under union rules as a machinist. No education beyond the 8th grade and what he learned in the US Navy during WWII. He was able to afford a house in a Lower Midwestern city (one that would be considered LCOL) and five kids.
I have a bachelor's degree that's paid for, a decent paying software job, and no wife/kids. Wanna guess how many homes I own in the same city?
Aside from the financial arguments, the social and personal development opportunities of living and studying with your peers can be pretty great in my experience. I went to a decent school and was surrounded by a lot of very interesting and smart kids and I had some truly great professors. I was really pushed beyond what I thought I could do and my biggest regret is that I didn't take a little extra time for more courses in the humanities (specifically literature and art history).
People who say they use gambling to "dream" or "Hope" are just coping.
You don't have to spend a single penny to dream or hope some sort of better outcome for yourself in the next few days that has much better odds than winning the lottery.
> no other widely accessible path for young people to build a future
This is exactly right. Widespread gambling has a fundamental nihilism baked into it. If you believe hard work and frugality are the best path to success, then gambling doesn't feel like a good use of your income and energy.
But if you feel like your dreams are falling out of reach despite your hard work, if it starts to look like even big investors are really just playing a game (often with loaded dice) rather than acting on fundamentals, if grift seems like a more reliable path to success then hard work and ingenuity, then all of a sudden gambling seems a lot more sensible. Even if the odds aren't in your favor, you can at least get lucky when you gamble. When the game feels rigged its easy to believe that hardwork is destined for failure, whereas even loaded dice have some probability of landing in your favor.
Well said. It's an unspoken "secret" as well that state gambling is a tax on the poor, feeding on desperation. This isn't even funding taxes though, just lining these companies and their insiders pockets.
> A college degree is no longer a guaranteed path to a stable, well paying job. Building wealth through real estate is no longer viable.
...and winning a life's fortune via gambling is even less viable. I agree with what you're saying about the lack of guaranteed paths to prosperity but turning to gambling is not a logical outcome stemming from it. There is no logic in gambling at all. It is purely a vice that preys on people's weaknesses.
If you're already losing and losses are capped past some point (worst case just kill yourself), high stakes gambling is quite logical. Of course in reality, gamblers are rarely driven by game-theoretical analysis.
I think we're trying really hard to rationalize a fundamentally irrational behavior here. The vast majority of people betting on Kalshi are not thinking "well, worst case I'll just kill myself".
> We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling
No, instead we should tackle the actual root of the problem, and fix the economy. If everyone can make a living, afford housing, find jobs, and find something they love to do that pays, and get medical care they need, they won't turn to these things.
They're not independent problems. Right now, someone on the East Coast is taking their lunch break; in a world without phone gambling, they would be studying business principles so they can put their name up for a manager role when it opens. But instead they're trying to pick the right sports bet that will make them rich this evening.
Of course there are paths to success, and they are available, but we live in a tiktok world where everyone wants to be a millionaire tomorrow and not in 20 years.
Even better, be the guy that taxes the house and winners, sells the licensing to the house (or friends of them that have privileged advantage to sell compliance services), or the guys who determine whether the house gets its zoning or construction exemptions.
How is that better? Taxes are a cut of the profits and they mostly are spent back on other goods and services. The owners of the gambling business take the remaining majority of the money and use it to scale themselves up, remove competition or to enrich their ranks. If you want to exist as a parasite, option #2 is the way to go.
It is crazy to me that even when faced with the most irredeemable industry, one that is predicated on abusing addiction and human irrationality, one that takes and gives back nothing, the first reaction to this is to brush all of that off and go "but what about the construction permits?"
The American adoration for anything 'private' knows no bounds. When our corporate overlords will be scamming, poisoning and forming quasi-dictatorships to rule over us all for profit, they'll still be cheering that at least it's not one of those pesky public governments.
Money is important, but there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to lobbying and campaigning. Elon's success at putting candidates into office isn't great, despite flooding massive amounts of cash into several elections.
Candidates themselves and the way they campaign matters more. Cuomo had 3x the warchest than Mamdani had, for example.
Small dollar donations can also level the playing field for candidates that can gain some national appeal (this does come with its own set of problems and perverse incentives, though)
How in the world do we get money out of politics? I want to so so so badly, but I have no idea how to successfully do it. I can't even figure it out as a thought exercise.
We would need a Constitutional amendment to explicitly state that spending money on political campaigns doesn't count as an exercise of freedom of speech (1st Amendment). The Supreme Court Citizens United v. FEC decision was built on that legal foundation. We can argue about whether the court's interpretation was correct or politicized, and it might be reversed someday by different justices, but ultimately the only stable solution will be an amendment.
Any sort of reform that would successfully get money out of politics would require a constitutional amendment. I have little faith that the current Congress would pass any sort of amendment that would eliminate the system they benefit from unless there was at least a reasonable possibility that the states would call for an Article V convention, but the state legislatures also benefit from the current corrupt system so I don't see this happening either. You can't wholesale replace Congress either because the lack of term limits and the staggered terms means that the special interest groups that benefit from corruption will try to primary candidates before you can build up a critical mass (see what happened to Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush).
One approach is to reduce discontinuities and spoiler-effects in voting, which in turn reduces the incentives for a politician to accept—or someone else to offer—a devil's bargain. As it stands now, there's lots of potential for: "Do me a favor and my money will push you the small distance that distinguishes total defeat from total victory."
That leads to some game theory and math, with things like some form of ranked-voting, uncapping the House of Representatives, and maybe even proportional-representation rather than lots of just-one-winner races.
I think some places have the government give every party equal (by what measure? I don't remember. Past votes maybe?) money for campaigning and no donations are allowed.
Others have offered contrived rules for solving it through policy, but these don't account for how to get those with power over us to institute such rules to bind their own hands and then to follow the rules to their own detriment
Democracy doesn't exactly have a long history of stable states, and the US only been a liberal democracy for about 60 years. In that time we've done very little to hold politicians accountable. It's not clear there is a democratic fix outside of the theoretical realm. Nobody wants to kill the golden goose....
See also: the healthcare system, and the military.
We pump spectacular amounts of money (~10% of GDP in the former case based on diffing high-end-of-normal healthcare costs for peer states with ours, and who knows how much in the latter but probably around the same) into white collar and blue collar (respectively) jobs programs and wage-supplementation that buy us basically nothing. A ton worse than a proper jobs program building public infrastructure (the CCC or something) or dumping that money into doctor training or whatever. Extremely poor ROI, but we can't touch them or GDP craters (nominally only—these aren't producing much in the first place, the P part of GDP, of course, which is probably part of why the US doesn't feel as rich as it looks on paper)
The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.
Healthcare was similar until the wage stagnation really started impacting the ability to deliver service. It went from 9% of GDP in 1970 to 19% today, supported by payroll that has risen way under inflation.
About 20% of the US economy is killing people, 20% healing people, and the rest is everything else.
> The military thing is a much bigger flywheel. A lot of technology really comes out of military research or is supported in key ways by military projects.
Yeah, I wouldn't call all our military spending unproductive waste. I'm not insensitive to arguments even about building stuff we don't need simply in order to keep a particular industry healthy-enough that it's ready to expand in case of an actual, serious war. I think a good deal of it is, though, and the reason it's hard to tamp down is that it's not-so-secretly a jobs program that Republicans are willing to vote to fund (even if we'd get more out of spending the same money to have the same people build parks infrastructure or whatever).
Something like a quarter of all US healthcare spending is "low value care" which isn't justified by evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. It isn't healing people and often harms them. We have a huge problem with waste, fraud, and abuse.
How does that even work in a democracy that has systemic flaws, where the elections boil down to which candidate had the most financial support? USA's democracy is beyond fixing, it needs a complete refactoring amd stronger checks before elections of both candidates and officials become meaningful for regular citizens.
With no clear options the only visible path to building a modicum of wealth is timing the next big crypto rugpull, hitting a 5 leg parlay, ripping a shiny charizard etc...
We can (and should) try and regulate away this kind of gambling but the underlying problem remains.