And so taken together the research does raise a fundamental question: Why exactly are we doing this? Who was hurt by longstanding — if, yes, softly patronizing — prohibitions against gambling? What are the social benefits of doing so much more of it? And if legalizing online sports books and wallpapering the lives of Americans with enticing advertisements for them strike you as a bad idea — or at least not especially thought-through — well, what does that imply about the country’s apparent shift toward risk-forward libertarianism rather than risk-shy paternalism in recent years? Take down Chesterton’s fence and many more people are going to make the leap on a hope and a prayer. Sometimes on a lark.
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The River and the Village are among the more memorable and illuminating new social typologies I’ve come across in recent years, and in certain ways a better fit for aspects of our ongoing culture war than “right” and “left.” They also imply a particular, somewhat triumphalist history of those years, which took us from fights over universal health care and trigger warnings through the jagged disorder of the Trump years and the tumult of a pandemic, which confronted the country with an entirely novel risk landscape but also enabled a gambling and day-trading stimulus-check boom, and pushed the country out the other side considerably more libertarian on matters of public health. Even if, all along, both sides of the Covid culture war were both more aligned and more ambivalent than public wisdom now appreciates, the pandemic was a looking glass, through which a “Don’t Tread on Me” nation became still more fetishistic about individual autonomy and freedom from collective responsibilities. “The River is winning,” as Silver writes. “Silicon Valley and Wall Street are still accumulating more and more wealth. Las Vegas is taking in more and more money. In a world forged not by the toil of human hands but by the computations of machines, those of us who understand the algorithms hold the trump cards.”
Silver isn’t blind to the downsides of these trends, both within the world of gambling and beyond. He notes, for instance, that Americans live on average five fewer years than our G.D.P. alone would imply, suggesting that the difference may come down to the country’s larger appetite for risk-taking. He describes the low-end, down-market corners of the sports-book world as “definitely predatory.” He takes issue with some of the ruthless utilitarian logic of effective altruism, which discards common-sense ethical intuitions as so much sentimentality or superstition. And he spends several mesmerizing chapters in the company of Sam Bankman-Fried, the fraudulent crypto billionaire and avowed effective altruist who seems to straddle all the various tributaries of the River and looks today to many like a kind of representative stand-in for its problems.
Before his downfall, Bankman-Fried famously described the basic crypto business model as a Ponzi scheme — and did so casually, without seeming to understand what was problematic about building not just an offshore trading empire, but also a future-focused philanthropic project, on the back of financial fraud. But perhaps the most memorable and revelatory moment of his somewhat brief life as the next Warren Buffett and effective altruism’s version of Bill Gates came during a podcast interview with the libertarian economist and intellectual Tyler Cowen. Presented with a game of chance in which there was a 51 percent chance of doubling global value and a 49 percent chance of total destruction of the universe, Bankman-Fried told Cowen that he would choose to play the game and would take those odds. More than that: that he would make that choice not just once, crossing his fingers, but continuously and confidently, given the logic of positive expected value.
Silver faults Bankman-Fried for being reckless with risk. But squint at the world in a certain way, or look at it too much through the prism of social media, and it can begin to seem that even if the onetime boy king of crypto is now to most a cautionary tale, his basic manner of thinking is thriving and crowding out others. It is, after all, the language of many of the country’s most conspicuous “winners” — from Silicon Valley founders and venture capitalists to self-described rationalists and ruthless number-crunchers like Silver himself. Talk to those Americans most eager to debate, discuss and promote risk-taking, and what you get, Tim Wu wrote in his review of “On the Edge,” “is a glimpse of the economy of the future.”