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The Moral Limits of Gambling [Or: what do Polymarket and the history of life insurance have in common?]
(worldhistory.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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Great article. The rise of sports betting and other gambling has been hard to watch as someone on the outside who doesn't have an interest in gambling.
I think one side of the story that this article didn't touch on that separates modern gambling such as Polymarket from the life insurance gambling of old is the participation of youth gamblers in today's market. I think for me and many others it is especially alarming to imagine that children are the ones gambling on whether people will die. And I think that the normalization of children in betting sits in its own context of rising "loot crate" schemes in video games (not that it is completely normalized for children to gamble yet, but it is gradually becoming so).