‘You Barely Understand Regular Money’: Why Young Men Keep Gambling

If $10,000 can't buy you a house, why not gamble it?

That might not seem like a sound financial decision, but it's an increasingly familiar mindset for many Americans — particularly young men — who are watching prices march steadily higher and feeling like they can't keep up.

Jonathan Cohen, gambling policy lead at the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me inflation in general and the unaffordability of housing in particular has fed a rise in financial nihilism and pushed many people to look for easy ways to ramp up their bank balances.

"With a couple of Eagles parlays, I have a chance of making [that $10,000] into $100,000," he said. "Now I have a down payment."

Gambling, meme stocks, crypto and other get-rich-quick schemes have soared in popularity alongside inflation, fed by a much more permissive regulatory environment for such products in the past few years. And research supports the theory that a lot of people think of gambling as a way to build wealth, or at least as similar to investing: A paper published last month shows that, when states legalize gambling, the money households put into wagers displaces investment activity, rather than purchases.

At the same time, data from the Citizens Capital Markets and Advisory investment bank shows that the median users of sports gambling apps and prediction markets lose money on net.

Obviously, risky bets have grown in popularity in part because betting is fun. But Washington bears responsibility too: Economic and political realities shaped by decisions here seem to be greasing the skids for potentially destructive financial behaviors.

Ethan Simmons-Patterson, a 33-year-old standup comedian and pediatric nurse who lives in Brooklyn, told me he's been troubled by what he hears from his friends and other young men, like the early-20s guys he plays basketball with at the YMCA.

"'If I get in crypto, I get invested. I can make money,'" they say, according to Simmons-Patterson. "'The president has a coin. The president's hustling.'"

"I watched my friends talk about it in a way that they thought they had struck gold, or struck oil or something like that," he added. "And in my mind, I'm looking at these guys like, 'You barely understand regular money.'"

He also described the ubiquitous 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 could gamble."