‘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.”

Not exactly foolproof.

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.”

Some of them, he added, are more drawn to it because they’re “financially desperate.”

This trend is particularly important at a time when people’s paychecks are slowly being eroded by rising prices, with average inflation-adjusted hourly wages ticking down 0.7% between September 2025 and September 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Meanwhile, the portion of economic output that goes to worker pay and benefits, rather than, say, corporate profits, has dipped in part because of automation, a trend that Goldman Sachs economists expect to continue because “AI is likely to automate many additional tasks,” they wrote in a note last month.

In a bid to stem some of the worst fallout from riskier financial behavior, Cohen from the American Institute for Boys and Men said his organization is in the process of developing a holistic set of policy proposals to address gambling-like products across sectors. For example, they’re endorsing practical “speed bumps” like deposit limits or time limits as a default setting to create more friction for people engaged in betting.

Lawmakers are also in the early stages of considering practical guardrails. Legislation from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) would prohibit sports betting advertising during live sporting events and take steps intended to ensure that people can afford their wagers, such as prohibiting gambling companies from accepting deposits via credit card.

Politicians also could 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 like that have overall gotten far less attention than sexier alternatives.

The relative merits of legalized gambling have grown more salient since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling gave states an opening to legalize sports betting, paving the way for roughly half of younger men to have an online sportsbook account, as research has shown.

Prediction markets like Kalshi also entered the fray on sports last year after getting a regulatory blessing to do so, significantly boosting their popularity.

But encouraging riskier products could actually hurt people’s ability to build wealth through more durable 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 inflation to be higher, you put more of your money into higher-yield assets, whether that’s 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 baseline assumption that crypto is going to get me there,” Aiello said.

“All these reductions in regulatory barriers, it makes crypto and prediction markets and gambling more accessible,” he added.

Perhaps that’s the new American Dream.