I’ll admit it – I have a problem. For almost a year there’s nothing I’ve thought about more than gambling. Whenever I sit down to do my essays, I feel compelled to check the odds every half hour. Prices and probabilities are the subject of many of my daydreams, and some of my regular dreams as well. At this point you may think I need to get professional help. Maybe I do. On the other hand, it makes me money.
Every child of the sensible middle class knows gambling is bad. Hordes of young men do it anyway. In a sense, it doesn’t matter what you bet on. Roulette, poker, football games, and crypto are bets. Your dad with his long-only stock portfolio thinks he’s ‘investing’, but he’s making bets too, just in slow motion. Most of them lose, some ruin their lives. The flip side of this is that gambling is a zero-sum game, and the money they lose has to go somewhere.
Hopefully, some of it ends up in my pocket. I do my best to make that happen. Put another way, my life is about making bets that exploit the rich and stupid. It’s disgusting. But it’s fun, and I don’t want to get a job. As a humanities student, it seems my only options are to commodify myself for a finance career, or be poorer than everyone I know. Well, I choose the secret third option. How ironic that my distaste for living under capitalism can only be escaped by mastering a game that is a parody of capitalism.
Money is supposed to reflect social relationships. Alice fixes Bob’s sink, and Bob owes her a favour. Instead, Bob monetises the exchange by giving her a token that represents Alice has done something useful, allowing her to get the favour from someone else. Further abstracting the favours, we can allow them to be lent out and repaid with interest. Parents can pass favours on to their children, who pass it on to their children, and so on, so some people are born with a billion favours and some with none. Some people believe this is a good system, citing invisible hands redistributing goods efficiently, and meritocratic rewards for hard work. Others have raised objections. Yet they agree that markets are justified only by their claim to serve the common good, and that money is supposed to be a token of value.
In gambling this is all thrown out the window. No gambler pretends that they’re aiming to do anything other than enrich themselves at someone else’s expense. Money is no longer linked to real value or production, but it becomes a plaything, numbers on a screen, buttons you click to increase your highscore. Effective gamblers are desensitised: while they intensely want to win, they don’t relate the money to anything in the real world. It’s just a game, with P/L as the scoreboard.
Some might argue for a distinction between gambling and trading, where trading helps to distribute capital in a way that optimises the productive capacity of society. On one hand, it’s true that markets are an information system. But way too many markets are totally disconnected from anything meaningful in the real world, and just serve as a vehicle for gambling. Much of the $3 trillion crypto market exists for this reason (apart from money laundering and organised crime). Even the stock market has so many gamblers participating that companies like GameStop and MicroStrategy are experiencing what is basically a permanent speculative bubble. We have way too many silly people in the world trying to trade things, and their losses support an ecosystem of people like me. I’m uncomfortable when I see gambling being romanticised. Well, firstly, it’s done by influencers to scam people into losing money. But more broadly, it speaks to a cultural moment when we hold up as an ideal this lifestyle where one becomes fabulously wealthy without helping anyone or creating anything. It is capitalism consuming its own tail.
On the bright side, the economic inequalities gambling markets produce are meritocratic. If I made money, that’s because I had a better guess of what the price would be tomorrow than someone else. Sometimes that is because I’ve been tipped off by an insider, or because I plan to perform a pump-and-dump scam. This is no affront to meritocracy – cheating is part of the game. Gamblers ask a recurring question: insider or retard? Is the price acting strange because they know something I don’t, or because they’re just plain dumb? Usually it’s the latter, but occasionally there’s an insider that makes bank because all the other gamblers mistake him for a retard. Such is the risk one takes doing these things.
In conclusion, gambling is bad, okay? I hope to make enough money that I’ll be able to quit and actually do something good with my life. I hope one day society changes so people don’t feel the need to punt thousands of dollars on something they don’t understand. Whichever comes first, I guess. I’m always guessing.
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