We Can Now Bet on Almost Anything. Should We?

Human beings have always loved to gamble. Archaeological records suggest we’ve been doing it for the last 12,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age. But for as long as we’ve been playing games of chance, we’ve worried about what they might be doing to us. For thousands of years, everyone from Aristotle to George Washington condemned gambling, an ancient anxiety that ran so deep it became something like a moral consensus. And then that consensus evaporated. In the span of a decade, both Canada and the US legalized sports betting. Now anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can wager on basketball, hockey, or American cornhole. But it turned out that was just the beginning. A few years later came “prediction markets” like Kalshi and Polymarket that let you bet on, well, just about anything: whether the US will invade Cuba, the odds of James Comey being sent to prison, and whether Jesus Christ will return before 2027. That last one, by the way, is currently sitting at 3% on P...