Mikistan wrote:mrdressup wrote:mrdressup wrote:
Gambling was always there for kids? It was practically non existent when I was growing up. We had no exposure to it. There weren't even provincial and State lotteries. About the only form of gambling that was widespread was weekly one night bingo games run by churches and fraternity groups. No one had stock trading accounts either. You were in a class apart if you had access to a stock broker, and stock markets hardly produced gains. No adult I knew followed that. We collected sports cards that were not seen as buying lottery tickets. More joy was achieved in completing sets with players we didn't even know. All I wanted was goalie cards. All my Wayne Gretzky rookie cards were traded away by my brother for a bunch of stickers he wanted to put on his lunch box. In time we started to see illegal punch boards appear in the back of convenience stores. Arcades weren't paying you off in anything but adrenaline, and you could get hooked on that. There weren't video games yet. We played outside, and winning hardly mattered because we never kept score most of the time until we simulated overtime when the games were nearing their end. When I was given my first pen knife I thought the world was my oyster for all the things I imagined I could carve with it. None of it was supposed to be a source of profit.
What I would say is that in a generation (my generation) we saw a complete transformation of the world in this regard. Gambling has been completely normalized. Governments run and sanction these things today. Everyone wants to be in bed with it to get their little bit of trickle down.
So, it's absolutely not the case that it has always been there. It wasn't everywhere in the mid 1970s. When we entered the greed is good era of the 1980s things changed. It is not before the 1980s that stock markets became a preoccupation of the middle class and a gambler's mentality slowly entered the fray. We needed cable TV to show us all that was a thing. We could not want what we did not know existed. When I went to University no young adult traded in equities yet. People still aspired to do things to get ahead. However it was the beginning of the era when yard sales started to appear. The treasure hunter/seekers mentality we have today exploded at this time. This is when I first heard rumblings that stuff I had played with as a kid had "collector" value. This is now synonymous with growing up now, and it is being exploited in young people by trying to sell them "collectible" whatever. People are mining virtual mountains for nuggets at a very young age. It's all exploitative of someone down the food chain. We clearly eat our young today. We couldn't care less that the barriers to entry to a normal life require huge credit bets to be made. I bought my first house with the proceeds of two summers of lawn mowing. 5K down is all I had to put up. 7 years of U set me back less than 4K. I made it to middle age without ever having to use personal credit. Actually, I still don't use it. I still only pay cash. I don't see progress all around me. I see plenty of social decline and a never ending supply of distraction and false aspiration.
It wasn't that long ago.
Congratulations, you got to benefit from intergenerational wealth disparity. In truth the prices you paid were underpriced because they were subsidized by the future generations for your benefit.
You get that transition wrong. It's today's level of prosperity that you see all around you that was the novel addition. It came out of scientific progress produced by public institutions and then transferred to the private sector for it to profit from. We were all relatively poor of material wealth back then and no one knew any differently. I never owned a pocket calculator until I was 18. This expansion was paid for by rather large consumer credit bubble that did not exist prior to the mid 1980s. All who buy things today are acquiring it from an ability to pay for it in the future. We didn't live like that. My parents never had a mortgage. They bought their first home for 8K. The quality of life we had was high, and that stemmed from a very large war dividend that was gone by the early 1970s. The public sector was the largest hirer of the educated. Society aspired to be better for all in it then. There was a domestic industrial economy still existent at this time, so there were local economic flows widely dispersed. Most of the world had to catch up to our quality of life. Eventually we had to compete with global economies which were once leveraged for our benefit. In many ways exploiting the new entrants into the economy here is what is left. When there is no potential remaining to do so, we have concluded that we needed to import new population to exploit. They are eyed as the future seeds of new borrowing. Their children will be that too. A lot of what went wrong can be traced back to economic ideologies that were normalized starting around 1972. It's beyond exploitative. All that it promises is instant temporary happiness and thrills. The NBA prior to 1980 is not even something I was aware of. I cannot say that it has been progress for me to have been made aware of it. It allows me to live vicariously through it. Obviously, many youth have been swept into this at a much earlier age than we ever were. Video game culture is something that I almost completely avoided. I don't feel I was robbed of some great advance for not having that as a child.
