Based on how much they like gambling.

Prediction markets are 90% sports gambling.

You can also ban 100% of gambling advertising and get 100% of the (dubious, but I'll humour the possibility) 'benefits' of gambling, while removing 90% of the downsides.

Can you explain the value you're talking about?

yeah it seems winning the lottery is now our best chance for survival.

> "Become a famous pop star or sports hero." - as improbable as ever.

It's even more improbable. For both of those, your starting to see more and more of the current generation that are children/nieces/nephews of the already famous. They have the financial comfort to pursue it, and the family connections in the industries.

And for sports, the level at which you have to be competitive is getting younger and younger. So much more sports science/nutrition going in at the middle school/high school level.

Those were two fields that seemingly were still meritocratic, but that is fading fast, if it ever existed at all.

I think "huge part ... is from desperation" needs a citation. Gambling has been known to be a vice for millenia. There was an article on here not long ago where a reporter did sports gambling for a year for a story; he started off Mormon, disinterested in gambling, with $10k from the company, and after he lost it, he put himself on the state self-exclusion list because now he had a problem with gambling. The null hypothesis is that gambling is a vice, so to make it about desperation needs some evidence.

Also, "traditional wealth-producing ladders have all been pulled up" is nonsense. The stock market is available to all comers, and long investing is a traditional path. There was a story here a few years ago about a black janitor in NYC who died and left $7 million to the MoMA (or some such); he had invested $10k a year in the stock market. People in the trades still make good money. People on this site also tend to be in the making good money careers. I saw a bunch of young couples--and not the techy-looking ones, either--at the open houses this spring in the midwest. Also, one should not extrapolate one's situation at 25 to be the same at 45; if you've done reasonable savings, 45 should looking wealthier.

> while a portion of this rise obviously consists of troubled/[...], a huge part of the rise of gambling is from desperation

Is that really so? It's a get-rich-quick scheme and absolutely no one is under any illusions otherwise, including the people gambling their rent money. They know it's a very long shot and that most people don't make bank, but they hope it'll go different for them.

WallStreetBets, just another form of gambling, is filled with posts of people losing everything but it doesn't seem to stop newbies.

The gap between troubled/problem/addicted and "desperate" has to be paper thin, if it exists at all.

Bankruptcy at this point is just a way to signal to creditors not to lend more money to this individual. As you said alimony, child support, student loans, restitution are a must so the filing simply is a formal notice that "every penny this person ever earns is already earmarked, heed this warning before lending"

This claim is simply false. The cause of bankruptcy in the U.S. has been extensively studied and absolutely none of the criteria you list comes even close to the number 1 reason that people in lower or middle class declare bankruptcy: medical bills.

  Bankruptcy won't even discharge the kind of debt many/most of the lower-middle class fall broke upon. 

What restitution is the average american on the hook for these days?

For America specifically, it is somehow worse.

It took 25% of the nation being out of work to, not revolt, but popularly elect someone willing to to spend a little government money on healthcare and welfare.

So it will get much worse before Americans finally read a book and figure out we should maybe do something different.

  > So it will get much worse before Americans finally read a book and figure out we should maybe do something different.

That's a relatively new idea. It was fundamental to the American and French revolutions, and it was brand new at the time. (The Americans were heavily cribbing off French thinkers, though it took most of a century for the French to implement it.)

It's been the basic claim of liberal democracies for the past 250 years, and they were so successful that people thought it would become universal. But it reached a peak around 30 or 40 years ago -- right about the time that the Soviet Union fell and the "tech age" really got going.

The US in particular saw that as victory for America, and in particular victory for its wealthy class. So it has been leading everything away from liberal democracy.

So obvious I don't know why you had to say it