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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
