You are on to something. Dignified retirement used to mean a pension for years of hard work. We now live in a world of charlatans, and people who allow themselves to be taken advantage of. Paging P. T. Barnum. P. T. Barnum to the sucker born every minute phone.
We also live in a world devoid of conventional wisdom. My grandparents learned that gambling was at best entertainment, they also learned to scrimp and save. My peers don’t learn this, they depend on regulation to protect them against everything, and when there isn’t regulation, they racked up six figures of student loan debt (financing a party lifestyle) and they gamble as a financial strategy.
The point isn’t to shame my peers, nor is it that my grandparents generation was without vice, but that maybe there’s something robust about developing a culture of conventional wisdom as a fallback for an increasingly unreliable government? Maybe policy isn’t the only thing that matters?
Well our grandparents lived in a world (if they were in a first world country) where working a normal job with a stay-at-home mom was enough for a comfortable retirement. This made gambling, at best, the entertainment it was viewed as.
In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope
I think it probably has more to do with them living through the Great Depression and WWII. I don't know why living in better economic times would have made them less cautious.
I'm not sure how you got less cautious from my comment. In fact I was saying the opposite, that they viewed gambling as a pastime or entertainment, not as a legitimate way to make money. It's when a person considers it a means of getting out of a financial tight spot that they start to make ridiculous and dangerous bets.
