All In: How Gambling Culture Replaced the American Dream
What if "work hard and play it safe" quietly morphed into "go all in or get left behind"?
All In: How Gambling Culture Replaced the American Dream is a sweeping tour through a world where risk isn't confined to casinos anymore-it's baked into paychecks, housing, higher education, sports, investing, gaming, and even how people build an online audience. Drawing on hundreds of documentaries, investigations, clinical papers, policy reports, and firsthand accounts, this book shows how life itself is being reframed as one long series of bets-and who pays when the house always seems to win.
Inside, readers will discover how:
Lotteries, casinos, and "painless" gambling taxes became tools to fund public budgets while quietly shifting costs onto those with the least to spare.
Online casinos, mobile sportsbooks, and zero-commission trading apps turned phones into portable casinos, collapsing the barriers between boredom, financial stress, and high-speed risk.
Fantasy sports, esports betting, social casino games, and loot boxes train people-often from childhood-to think, feel, and decide like gamblers long before they ever download a betting app.
Economic precarity, gig work, student debt, and thin safety nets make high-risk bets feel less like entertainment and more like strategy in a rigged game.
Communities, clinicians, and public-health researchers are quietly building a different path: from harm-maximizing products and regressive funding schemes toward shared security, slower wins, and recovery-oriented systems of care.
Rather than preaching or moralizing, All In organizes a vast body of reporting and research into a clear, gripping narrative-from colonial lotteries to Las Vegas, from offshore poker rooms to legalized U.S. sports betting, from kids' loot boxes to crypto casinos and prediction markets. Each chapter spotlights the systems, incentives, and design tricks that push people toward bigger risks, then follows the fallout through families, neighborhoods, and public budgets.
Readers who care about money, sports, tech, politics, addiction, or the future of the middle class will come away with a new lens: gambling is not just a pastime at the edge of society, but a blueprint for how risk, responsibility, and hope are being redistributed in the 21st century. This book doesn't tell anyone never to place a bet-but it does ask a harder question: why are so many of the biggest bets now being made by ordinary people, while institutions quietly lock in the odds?
If you want to understand how a culture built on steady progress slid into an era of jackpots and wipeouts-and what it would take to build a less "all or nothing" world-this is your field guide.
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