> 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.
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-inc...
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.
You are so wildly off base from my lived experience that I have to assume you have no experience with generational poverty.
You are not saving up to improve your life because the savings rate is too small to effectively matter. And all the savings you muster can be wiped out by, well, any extra expense. Car breaks down, medical copay, kid needs clothes due to a growth spurt, bank fees, etc.
If any chance event will break you, it is not entirely illogical to lean on chance to save you.
If you don't see light at the end of the tunnel, or you think that light is an oncoming train, you are not going to "act rationally" for arriving at the end of the tunnel.
Yes. Of all people, Jordan Peterson used to talk about this a lot. He said anybody will break from enough cycles of hard work with no reward, and that's when people do stupid things. The nickel and diming of everything alone is enough to drive a person insane if they don't make enough money to ignore it.
So very true, homie: Why didn't all the gambling addicts put their money into a Vanguard account instead? Are they stupid?
Your opinion seems to be that poor people are poor because they're irrational, and that systemic things like billion-dollar corporations deliberately feeding them addictive behaviors in order to extract as much money from them as possible, is not actually a factor at all.
I'm sorry but this comment is so out of touch with how poor people (or even people in general) actually function, I don't know what else to say.
> Your opinion seems to be...
I'd be impressed if you can link that back to something I said, I don't think my opinion is that at all. I haven't said anything about poor people, for example.
If someone has enough money that wasting it on gambling is a problem, then they clearly had no business giving up hope because "the system" doesn't have the ability to make their lives better. The system that makes their lives better is the money they just wasted, but invested in something productive.
Someone can't claim to be hopeless about the potential to improve their material comfort when the means to do so was just sitting in their bank account. They have money spare - start spending it to make life better.
I'm happy to accept that gamblers are irrational, but their problem isn't that the system is causing them to give up hope, their problem is that they are irrational gamblers. Sucks to be them, but it isn't anything to do with systemic external factors beyond casino advertising which is quite a specific thing and nothing to do with general hopefulness. Or the quite likely reality that they don't know what opportunity looks like despite it being right in front of them.
You pretty much just repeated the same thing back, so yes, I think that is your opinion.
> If someone has enough money that wasting it on gambling is a problem
They don't have enough money, which is precisely the point. The link I shared shows how lower income people spend dramatically more of their money on lotteries and gambling.
> their problem is that they are irrational gamblers.
How do you think they got that problem? Why do you think they continue to have that problem? It seems to me, that you think it's because they aren't rational enough about managing the money they do have, which...is what you said before: poor people are poor because they're irrational.
You don't seem to factor in the idea that certain groups of people are taken advantage of by bad actors, and that these people become accustomed to this exploitation, and learn helplessness in the face of it.
I think the points I'm making here are pretty obvious truths to anyone that has interacted with / from a lower income background, where gambling, lottery tickets, and other "vices" are widespread. These aren't rational financial decisions, they're consequences of being exploited by more powerful forces.
A working class person addicted to gambling isn't going to suddenly go, "Oh, I should just invest this money into an index fund." That is entirely alien to that culture and group of people. It's not something they were taught, it's not something their friends do, and it's definitely not something the institutions around them are interested in doing.
Now, if you said that, "then the goal should be to educate people so they invest their money and don't just gamble it away," then sure, that's a noble one. But as you said:
> Sucks to be them
Just putting it out there that I have a better grasp of my opinion than you do. Let me try this a different way. Which part of your comment do you think I don't know about/disagree with and, with reference to something I said, why? Let's just pick one thing that you think is clearest, but be specific.
EDIT You'll notice I haven't disagreed with anything you've said so far this thread, apart from where you have mischaracterised my opinions and your attribution of the root cause to hopelessness and lack of opportunity.
> which...is what you said before: poor people are poor because they're irrational.
I didn't say that.
> If someone has enough money that wasting it on gambling is a problem, then they clearly had no business giving up hope because "the system" doesn't have the ability to make their lives better. The system that makes their lives better is the money they just wasted, but invested in something productive.
This seems to be pretty clearly saying that you think poor people only gamble with money they don't need and if they didn't gamble they would be able to stop being poor by investing that money. That seems a pretty clear statement that you think that poor people who gamble wouldn't be poor if they didn't irrationally gamble money that they should have invested in their future.
You say you have a "better grasp" of your opinion. I say you don't have a good enough grasp of it to present it in an understandable way since this "misinterpretation" of your view seems to match pretty well with what you've actually said.
Well that is progress because now you're attributing something to me that is close to what I do believe, which is poor people who gamble probably are poor because they make terrible financial decisions. I mean, you linked an article earlier suggesting that there are people who spend more than 5% of their income on lotto tickets [0]. No mystery why they're poor, they make bad decisions with money. In percentage terms, 25% of income in savings is probably the magic line where suddenly the whole thing becomes financially self-sustaining. 5% is not an inconsiderable chunk of that. Someone who just donates that sort of chunk to a gambling company is not competent with money.
But that isn't "poor people", and it isn't reasonable to just assume that poor people are all incapable. Most are perfectly reasonable people who happen to be poor despite generally being responsible with what money they do have. And presumably not throwing away 5% of their income for no good reason. I suppose I might be over-estimating poor people, but that isn't any reason for you to start misrepresenting my beliefs.
> I say you don't have a good enough grasp of it to present it in an understandable way since this "misinterpretation" of your view seems to match pretty well with what you've actually said.
Bullshit. You claimed my opinion was "poor people are poor because they're irrational". That is both a ridiculous statement and a gross mischaracterisation of what I said. Realistically I probably should get an apology, although getting you to understand what I actually wrote is enough for me.
[0] If you read the article closely though, that isn't actually mathematically guaranteed. Means can be deceptive like that.
> Bullshit
You can disbelieve my honest report that you are not explaining your position well, but you seem to be confusing me with a differ commentor.
Oh sorry, if I'd registered the change of name I probably wouldn't have commented. But since I'm here anyway...
It is the internet, some number of people are always going to misunderstand any comment. If you don't get it then that is ultimately an exercise for you, the reader and if you have clarifying questions I'm generally happy to have a go an answering them. I write a lot of comments, I do my best to be clear, my best is not a standard of perfection.
But ol' mate is telling me what my opinion is, based on a ridiculous reading that isn't what I wrote, isn't something I ever believed and persisted in it after I'd drawn his attention to all those facts. At that point, it is more his problem than mine even if the comment is badly written. When someone says "my opinion is not X", they have never said "my opinion is X", never said anything that logically implies "my opinion is X" and it happens that believing in X is ridiculous, nobody has any business telling them that they seem to believe X. They probably do not believe X.
1 comment, sure fair enough happens to everyone. But at some point it's just being obtuse. If we're talking about real-world facts sure I get things wrong but at some point my opinion on my opinion is authoritative. I do not believe poor people are poor because they're irrational. If anyone is going to start insisting that I do they're running the risk of getting some progressively nasty language thrown at them, I do not intend to sit here quietly and be smeared by this chap.
> You can disbelieve my honest report that you are not explaining your position well
You seem to doing a decent job of it, you're doing a lot better than keiferski with just 1 attempt and no questions. I think he just did badly at reading comprehension on this one.
I think you’re establishing a false dichotomy. By and large, poor people are poor because they’re irrational. The businesses that prey on poor people—shady used car dealers, payday lenders, bookies—are exploiting this very irrationality. If we lived in a society where everybody was competent and responsible, none of these businesses could survive.
Alas, human beings sometimes have imperfections that leave them vulnerable to these predatory businesses. What’s more, the very irrationality of patronizing these businesses obviates any objection to restricting consumer freedoms by prohibiting and regulating these businesses.
That take feels lazy. Poverty isn’t primarily about irrationality, it’s about constraints. People make decisions that are locally rational given their options, but the system they’re operating in is tilted against them.
If rent eats half your income and your car breaks down, you’re not choosing between “investing” and “consuming.” You’re choosing between keeping your job and getting evicted. Behavioral quirks exist, sure, but they’re downstream of scarcity, and scarcity itself warps decision-making.
We’ve got decades of data showing that when you remove the constant pressure (through cash transfers, healthcare, childcare, etc.), people generally make long-term, rational decisions. The idea that “the poor are poor because they’re irrational” mistakes the symptom for the cause.
It is propaganda to "other" the poor. It is much easier to blame irrationality for people being poor rather than the systems we choose to keep in place. Those who convinced you of this falsehood, what are they gaining?
People aren't helpless pawns and they aren't perfect either. There's variability in the human ability to make rational economic decisions, isn't there? So what do you imagine happens if someone routinely makes bad economic decisions?
I don't think this explains 100% of why poor people are poor, but it doesn't explain 0% of it either. And to bring it back to the original point, we need to recognize that certain economic decisions, like sports gambling, are virtually always irrational decisions, and there's virtually nothing to be gained by protecting the consumer's freedom to make those decisions.
You seem to have a load-bearing assumption that in order to care about the poor, we can't even entertain the notion that any of them could ever possibly have become poor as a consequence of their own imperfections. Why is that? It seems obvious to me that when people end up poorer as a consequence of their gambling addictions, the obvious solution is to prohibit or at least more strictly regulate gambling, not to just leave those people to their fate.
> It is propaganda to "other" the poor. It is much easier to blame irrationality for people being poor rather than the systems we choose to keep in place. Those who convinced you of this falsehood, what are they gaining?
That take feels lazy and a little bit like projection. I'm not "othering" the poor, I'm trying to understand at least one of the problems they face and what solutions are possible. And one of "the systems we choose to keep in place" is this recent innovation of allowing online gambling to proliferate and freely advertise on every platform, which directly contributes to gambling addictions, which can and do ruin people's lives. Who stands to gain? The bookies. Yet you're the one arguing that the addict who blows his kids' college fund betting on football is "making decisions that are locally rational given their options", and I'm the one arguing that we should make it harder for the gambling industry to exploit him.
The post you replied too says, "they have no hope," so they toss their money away on a chance, the last unit resembling hope.
The solution is enabling hope. Your solution is to ignore that entire aspect and accept they have no hope and to be more pragmatic with their money.
It is like telling a depressed person they should try being happy.