Attention Economy


Saturday, February 12, 2022

Financial Literacy and Lessons in Investing

The internet turned “money” into a hobby
Why (mostly) 20- and 30-something dudes made crypto and sports betting their personality.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22922511/crypto-nfts-sports-betting-money-hobby
Because of the ways in which this type of information disseminates — in subreddits, in breathless Twitter threads, on niche Discord servers — the world of betting and investing is dominated heavily by people who are already well-represented in tech, finance, and internet culture, which is to say that it is overwhelmingly young and male. Proponents of crypto love to talk about the benefits of decentralizing the financial system, how it can allow for historically underrepresented groups to build wealth, and how NFTs can be used to fund projects supporting charitable causes. Celebrities, from A-listers like Matt Damon, Reese Witherspoon, and Gwyneth Paltrow to Z-list Bachelor influencers, evangelize cryptocurrency as an almost philanthropic cause; what goes unspoken is that they stand to profit from more people investing after them.


Related:

A Nation of Gamblers
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/opinion/super-bowl-gambling-sports.html
ROSS DOUTHAT:
The cascading, state-after-state legalization of sports betting, the ubiquitous ads for online gambling in the football playoffs, the billion dollars that the National Football League hopes to soon be making annually from its deals with sports betting companies — everywhere you look, the thin wall separating the games from the gambling industry is being torn away.
This transformation will separate many millions of non-wealthy Americans from their money, very often harmlessly but in some cases disastrously, with a lot of sustainable-or-are-they gambling addictions falling somewhere in between. And we’ve reached this point, in part, because of our unwillingness to live with inconsistencies and hypocrisies instead of ironing them out, our inability to take a cautious step or two down a slippery slope without tobogganing to the bottom.