If $10,000 can’t buy you a house, why not play it?
This may not seem like a wise financial decision, but it’s a mindset increasingly familiar to many Americans — especially young men — who see prices rise steadily and feel like they can’t keep up.
Jonathan Cohen, head of gambling policy at the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that inflation in general and housing unaffordability in particular have fueled a rise in financial nihilism and pushed many people to look for easy ways to increase their bank balances.
“With some negotiations with the Eagles, I have a chance to win (that $10,000) into $100,000,” he said. “Now I have a deposit.”
Not really foolproof.
Gambling, meme stocks, cryptocurrencies and other get-rich-quick schemes have grown in popularity alongside inflation, fueled by a much more permissive regulatory environment for these products in recent years. And research supports the theory that many people view gambling as a way to build wealth, or at least as a similar investment: article published last month shows that when states legalize gambling, the money that households invest in betting shifts investment activity rather than purchases.
At the same time, data from investment bank Citizens Capital Markets and Advisory shows that median users of sports betting apps and prediction markets are losing net money.
Obviously, risky bets have grown in popularity in part because bets are fun. But Washington also bears a responsibility: the economic and political realities shaped by decisions made here appear to encourage potentially destructive financial behavior.
Ethan Simmons-Patterson, a 33-year-old comedian and pediatric nurse who lives in Brooklyn, told me he was troubled by what he was hearing from his friends and other young men, like the 20-something guys he plays basketball with at the YMCA.
“‘If I get into crypto, I’m investing. I can make money,'” they say, according to Simmons-Patterson. “‘The president has a coin. The president is scrambling.'”
“I saw my friends talking about it in a way that made them think they had found gold, or oil, or something,” he added. “And in my mind, I look at these guys and say, ‘You guys barely understand regular money.'”
He also described the pervasive culture of sports gambling.
“They talk about how much money they’re losing,” he said. “And they’re getting into obscure sports like women’s college volleyball, stuff they’ve never watched, just so they can play.”
Some of them, he added, are more attracted to this activity because they are “financially desperate.”
This trend is particularly important at a time when people’s wages are slowly being eroded by rising prices, with the inflation-adjusted average hourly wage falling 0.7% between September 2025 and September 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Meanwhile, the share of economic output devoted to workers’ wages and benefits, rather than corporate profits, has declined in part because of automation, a trend that economists at Goldman Sachs expect to continue as “AI is likely to automate many additional tasks,” they wrote in a note last month.
In an effort to stem some of the worst consequences of riskier financial behavior, Cohen of the American Institute for Boys and Men said his organization is developing a holistic set of policy proposals to combat gambling-like products across all sectors. For example, they approve convenient “speed bumps” like deposit limits or time limits as a default setting in order to create more friction for people engaged in betting.
Lawmakers are also beginning to consider practical safeguards. The legislation from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) would ban sports betting advertising at live sporting events and take steps intended to ensure people can afford their bets, such as banning gambling companies from accepting credit card deposits.
Politicians could also focus on ways to help people build wealth more sustainably, along the lines of so-called Trump accounts, which are tax-advantaged investment vehicles for babies. Traditional market policies of this type have overall received far less attention than sexier alternatives.
The relative merits of legalizing gambling have become more apparent since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling gave states the option to legalize sports betting, paving the way for about half of young men to have an online sports betting account. as research has shown.
Prediction markets like Kalshi also entered the fray in the sports space last year after getting regulatory permission to do so, thereby significantly increasing their popularity. (In response to this column, Kalshi spokesperson Elisabeth Diana reiterated that the company views its business model as having “significantly healthier” incentives than sports betting.)
But encouraging riskier products could actually harm people’s ability to create wealth through more sustainable means.
Darren Aiello, a professor at Brigham Young University who has studied the relationship between inflation and crypto investing, said research suggests that if you expect higher inflation, you invest more of your money in higher-yielding assets, whether stocks or less traditional investments.
But gambling-like behaviors have a “double trigger,” he said. Higher prices increase people’s desire for “lottery-like returns,” but “there also has to be this basic assumption that crypto is going to get me there,” Aiello said.
“All of these reductions in regulatory barriers make the crypto, prediction and gambling markets more accessible,” he added.
Maybe this is the new American dream.
