In 2022, Americans lost $60 billion betting at licensed casinos and through licensed online gambling, Nate Silver writes in his engrossing new book, “On the Edge,” a meditation on risk, a study of those most comfortable taking it and an invitation for the rest of us to think about what it means that so much more of our lives now seems to hang on it.
That same year, Americans also lost about $40 billion in black-market betting, Silver notes, and $30 billion in state lotteries. These are just the losses, of course — $130 billion worth. The total wagers placed by Americans every year, he estimates, passes $1 trillion. Taken together, the two figures suggest that in 2022 Americans bet the equivalent of nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product and lost more than 10 percent of that money on those bets.
In Silver’s telling, this is not merely a story about the addictive appeal of making low-stakes wagers on your phone, but about a much larger drift toward a more volatile culture of risk-taking, across domains from professional sports to dating apps to venture capital and even, through the pandemic emergency and after, public health. “The activities that everyone agrees are capital-G Gambling — like blackjack and slots and horse racing and lotteries and poker and sports betting — are really just the tip of the iceberg,” he writes. “They are fundamentally not that different from trading stock options or crypto tokens, or investing in new tech startups.”
The result is an emergent rivalry that often resembles a culture war and is sometimes waged in partisan terms. On one side are relatively risk-averse groups — academics, the media and most political actors in the liberal mainstream — that Silver describes as members of a community he calls “the Village.” On the other side are a loose alliance of risk-takers — poker players and also N.B.A. nuts, venture capitalists and crypto speculators — Silver calls “the River,” which he divides into subcommunities.
“Upriver” comprises the high-minded intellectuals who call themselves rationalists and effective altruists and view the world through calculations of expected value. “Mid-river” is embodied by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where investors hungry for astronomical returns countenance liquidations of the country’s taxi industry and degradations of its eldercare systems, for instance. “Downriver” is table gambling and sports books, and, below that, the legal and moral gray zone of what he calls “the Archipelago,” represented by crypto’s more volatile corners and other sundry scams.
Sports betting illustrates the downriver drift. The Supreme Court functionally legalized sports gambling only in May 2018, and because the country’s experiment with on-demand gambling is so young, it’s not entirely clear yet what its negative effects are. And as with our experiment with marijuana legalization, it’s sometimes hard to separate those effects from moral panic. But according to one survey early this year, 39 percent of American men aged 18 to 49 have an online sports betting account, and 38 percent of Americans with such accounts reported betting more than they should. Almost 20 percent said they’d recently lied about how much they were gambling — about the same percentage that reported losing money that was intended to meet a financial obligation. In New Jersey, in just five years, the number of calls to the state’s gambling addiction hotline has tripled.
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