I have a new essay up at Foreign Policy this weekend, “‘On the Edge’ Puts Its Bets in the Wrong Place.” It’s a review of Nate Silver’s new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.
The book review is the ultimate output of a review thread that I wrote on Bluesky last month. The original review thread ended up spanning 83 posts, over 3,600 words in total. It includes *two* references to the Boss Baby tweet, several long diatribes about advanced poker theory, the phrase “Reverse-Isaac-Chotiner,” and a joke about finding Brooklyn on a map.
The Foreign Policy review is much tighter writing, and gets to the real heart of the matter. What’s missing from Silver’s book is any notion of systemic risk. It’s a celebration of the gambling economy, one that lionizes the winners as “highly-effective risk takers” without ever grappling either with the social consequences for the rest of us. The book is 576 pages, and yet it turns out to be surprisingly small.
As I write in the review,
[the book’s omissions] invite us to ponder whether there’s any societal value to all this gambling. The stock market may essentially be gambling, but it is a type of gambling that produces valuable byproduct information. Through the activity of the stock market, we are able to gauge aggregate investor opinion on the state and worth of publicly traded companies. What is the social benefit of building an equivalent marketplace for establishing the betting line on NBA games? Sophisticated sports bettors may have a better read than DraftKings on whether the Washington Wizards should be 7.5- or 8-point underdogs in their season opener. But what value does that add to the quality of play, or the fan experience, or anything at all? Why incur and encourage all the systemic risk, when the societal value is effectively nil?
Thematically, this piece fits pretty closely with a substack essay I wrote back in February, “Old Gambler Yells at Clouds.” I don’t write about the gambling economy very often on this blog, but I am pretty well convinced that legalizing vice and inviting the gambling industry to remove all the friction separating the casinos and sportsbooks from their potential marks has been a mistake.
Silver is cheering on social forces that we ought to be criticizing and shutting down. That’s worth a careful look.