UA Vol. 3, No. 2: With Gambling, Pro Sports Are Reaping What They’ve Sowed

And more on reclaiming American citizenship…

Let’s kick things off with a good read and a good stat:

GOOD READ: Aaron Renn on Contracts Instead of Trust. Renn looks at the growing phenomenon of donors offering their support to churches by establishing trusts that they control themselves to hold the church property. The trend underscores the decline in social trust, even between a religious institution and those most eager to support it financially. But as Renn notes, the purported solution—placing control with the grantor and his designees—only pushes the problem one step down the road. A donor-controlled foundation only offers certainty insofar as the designees share the grantor’s vision; is that more likely than a church remaining loyal to its commitments? He concludes: “Ultimately, the only genuine guarantor of institutions and property is a successful handoff to successive generations of faithful, competent stewards of them. There’s no substitute for proper generational succession.”

GOOD STAT: Not for sale. Promising to give Americans money is not the way to their hearts. Pollsters have been hard at work testing the proposition since President Trump announced at the GOP convention in Dallas, “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, … I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” Survey says? Bad move.

Axios / YouGov: 45% of likely voters are opposed to the $5,000 checks, while 43% are in favor; only 22% say he would deliver on the promise, while 61% say he would not.

Reuters / Ipsos: “Do you believe it is appropriate or inappropriate for President Trump to propose this dividend?” Appropriate: 17%. Inappropriate: 63%. Among Rs, 33/37. Among Is, 14/61.

THE ONGOING STRUGGLE TO FORESEE THE REAPING OF WHAT WE SOW

• SPORTS GAMBLING EDITION, from our Meredith Meroney:

The proliferation of legal online sports gambling platforms has made players from our major sports leagues the target of violent online and IRL threats against them and their families. Now, reports ESPN, leagues and players unions are pressuring state gambling regulators to “combat escalating harassment and violent threats from sports bettors.” But they’ve brought this on themselves.

The leagues have accepted the sportsbooks as official sponsors and partnered on promotions. Broadcasts are crammed full of gambling ads. Players are themselves becoming pitchmen. Where do they think that money comes from? The leagues’ letter to gambling regulators states: “Threatening the safety of an athlete or their family members over a sports bet crosses a bright ethical and criminal line, and it is entirely unacceptable.” True, about it being entirely unacceptable. But crossing a bright ethical line? No guys, you already did that when you embraced the chaos, corruption, exploitation, and abuse of sports gambling as it escaped from the world of illegal sports bookies and the physical boundaries of Las Vegas to become a legal industry. You’re so far past the line, you can’t even see the line. The line is a dot to you.

It must have sounded nice to profit from the vice, cash the checks of desperate people losing money they cannot afford to lose, and then call it a day. That’s not how this business works.

• DATA HARVESTING EDITION, from our Brad Littlejohn:

Meta is having a rough month. Just two weeks after agreeing to a settlement with 51 state attorneys general for its decade-long track record of collecting data from teens while harming their mental health, the company was again in the news for trying—and failing—to mine its own employees’ data. The story is at once a sobering glimpse at the dystopian incentives driving the AI race and a heartening reminder of what worker power can accomplish.

Meta first announced its Model Capability Initiative (MCI) back in April. The plan was to start recording employee screens and keystrokes, which many saw as a preview of what might soon become the norm in white-collar workplaces: (1) require all of your employees to start using AI to “augment” their jobs; (2) use the AI to track everything they do so it can harvest their tacit knowledge and train on it; (3) automate the job and let the workers go. Meta certainly didn’t help matters by announcing layoffs of 10% of its workforce the same month.

Fortunately, the remaining workers still had some agency. Within weeks of the announcement, they were circulating a viral petition against “The Eye of Sauron” and posting memes mocking the MCI. A massive privacy breach of the supposedly secure data over the summer finally forced the company to shutter the project. Workers 1, Panopticon 0.

The episode raises two important questions: First, while other firms will surely try similar schemes to optimize their in-house AI systems and reduce headcount, they may avoid advertising it. With almost no legal protections for data rights in the workplace, and few white-collar firms unionized, greater transparency and worker power are needed in this domain. Second, one cannot help but wonder, how many of these protesting employees spent the rest of their day helping to capture data from often unsuspecting users and find ways to profit from it? How many employees at various firms now developing sophisticated surveillance tools for employers would react with outrage if such tools were deployed on them? Tech leaders have long kept their products away from their own children. For how long will the industry manage to keep what it is building away from itself?

SPEAKING OF TECHNOLOGY AND CHILDREN, our Abigail Ball writes on the Jonathan Haidt vs. Peter Gray debate:

Peter Gray’s new book, Restoring Childhood, takes direct aim at the thesis of his former collaborator, Jonathan Haidt, which blames smartphones for much of what ails children today. Gray says it’s a broader lack of freedom that’s holding children back, and trying to protect them from smartphones is part of the problem. In a Wall Street Journal interview, he explains: “We have to pay more attention to teaching kids, beginning when they’re still young, how to use phones safely, just like we should be teaching them how to be outdoors safely.”

This seems to misunderstand the risks that smartphones pose. Yes, using technology safely is important. But that’s a generic concern. Predators were also a fear back in the days of message boards. The smartphone risk encompasses the addictive nature of its apps, the network effect and related collective active problem that makes opting out so hard, the way use expands to fill more and more time—ultimately, the direct conflict between screentime and the more important parts of childhood like developing independence outside the home or, more simply, just playing outdoors.

Gray is right, though, to direct focus toward the second half of that equation. While it’s a mistake to underrate the problems created by handing smartphones to children still in booster seats, that’s not the only reason the freedom and autonomy of childhood is in decline. Most parents embracing the “90s childhood” trend would look at Haidt’s and Gray’s contrasting emphases and respond: Por qué no los dos? We need to do something about the classroom Chromebooks, iPads in the car, and smartphones at age 10. We also need to do something about the ways we’ve made our public spaces increasingly hostile to children.

Recently, a Virginia mom made headlines when she received a six-month suspended jail sentence for “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” because she… allowed her five-year-old to walk alone to a nearby pond within a gated community to gather goose feathers. (In a sane world, no one would know this woman’s name, but since we do: Karyann Parkinson is more superhero than human—at the time of The Walk, she was eight months pregnant with her fifth child and studying for the bar exam.) Friend of the ’Stack Kate Meadowcroft had her own run-in recently with a neighbor reporting her for letting her baby nap in the car, with the doors open, parked in the shade, as she sat in the front seat.

While these examples are facially insane, the shift toward absolute safetyism, with negative judgment cast on anyone who dares adopt attitudes deemed normal until very recently, is very real and has become a vicious cycle: Community norms help define acceptable risk and departing from those norms becomes a risk itself, pushing everyone further toward risk avoidance, further narrowing the options for kids that parents will feel are safe.

YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE IS RISKY? BRIDGES. Our Oren Cass writes:

A fascinating dispatch from my neck of the woods, in the Berkshire Eagle: This 50-foot Lee bridge will cost $8 million to replace. Why? Good question. As the reporter explains:

Bridges built more than a century ago weren’t designed to meet today’s engineering standards, carry today’s traffic or withstand the range of conditions modern bridges are expected to endure. …

Modern designs are built to last 75 to 100 years and withstand worst-case scenarios, like extreme weather and flooding, Tyrell said.

To assess a bridge’s safety, researchers create mathematical models that show how cars and trucks will load and stress the structure, Gerasimidis said. For more complicated bridges, there are sometimes millions of elements that the computer is tracking and modeling to generate data about how the design will hold up.

In fact, building the bridge (which is expected to take four years) accounts for only $1.5 million of the $8 million price tag. More expensive? The $1.8 million to drill 24 ten-foot micropiles. “Older bridges were often built on structural supports called spread footings, which were dug 4 or 5 feet into the ground,” Tyrell said. If a bridge using that support is over a river, like the Mill Street bridge is, a flood can potentially wash it out. Micropiles, on the other hand, are drilled into bedrock, he said. The install requires specialty equipment, which makes it more expensive.”

But here’s the kicker: The bridge being replaced was built in… 1911. So it, um, lasted more than 100 years. What would the cost have been simply to recreate this sturdy, early-twentieth-century model? And how long would it have taken? We’ll never know. Not allowed.

Notice that this approach does not just force an extraordinary increase in cost and time, which in turn means fewer repairs completed, worse infrastructure nationwide, and less funding available for other community priorities. It also represents a shift in who gets to participate in our nation’s productive activities, substituting construction labor at more regular intervals for modeling labor that is only supposed to be done once. That might be defensible if it saved money. But it doesn’t.

Which is better: a $2 million bridge that might last 100 years but could also fail after 25? Or an $8 million bridge that is expected to last 100 years? The former provides the community with 100 years of bridge for at most $8 million (and spreads out that cost, which itself is of great value for a town’s finances). The latter provides the community with at most 100 years of bridge for $8 million. This is not a hard math problem.

Among the many consequences of our shift to a safety-obsessed culture (and perhaps among the causes) is a reduction in the share of a bridge’s value we attach to bridge-building and an increase in the share we attach to studying, modeling, re-engineering, managing, and litigating. There are cases where this shift is welfare-enhancing, in situations where better design and process will save much more than it costs, or in ones where failure is not an option. But for the 50-foot bridges in your town and mine, and the countless comparable problems and projects nationwide, we are getting it wrong.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MONEY. Finally, our Chris Griswold highlights an excellent conversation on the citizenry as the ultimate, and perhaps only, real check on political corruption:

The president’s wealth continues to occupy more and more column inches and podcast hours. Conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell recently interviewed Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith for the New York Times on the matter, asking: “Trump Is Getting Even Richer. Is That a Crime?” It’s an interesting question. The president made over $2 billion in 2025, the bulk of that from cryptocurrency, and much of that involving foreign investment from countries with urgent policy concerns on the Resolute Desk.

Add stories like the sale of early access to the president’s Truth Social posts to Wall Street, or a Russian oligarch funding Don Jr.’s wedding afterparty, and questions about the legal status of the president’s wealth keep getting more salient. (The Republican Senator John Curtis has apparently seen enough; on Friday, he said of the unconventional wedding financing, “It just stinks. It’s corruption. I don’t like it.”)

Some of Trump’s gain may be unlawful, but much of it is probably not. This is uncharted territory, and the president is largely exempt from conflict of interest rules anyway. As I argued recently at Commonplace, that’s somewhat beside the point. Regardless of legality, “leveraging public office for private gain is gross.” It is “a betrayal of the public trust and a violation of the political virtue that we require from our leaders.”

In a sense, Trump is simply following the trend lines, and doing exactly what our everything-is-for-sale market fundamentalism tells us all to do. As our statement on Reclaiming American Citizenship puts it, “American elites have treated the basic norms and behaviors of ordered liberty as a game, undermining the rule of law and normalizing a culture of taking whatever you can get.”

Caldwell and Goldsmith land here, too. “There’s also kind of an ethics of the free market that has been developing for a much longer time than Donald Trump has been on the scene. And I’m wondering if maybe the president, and some of the people around him, part of what they’re expressing is just stuff they’ve absorbed in the general culture,” says Caldwell. Rectifying the situation will require citizens themselves to demand more from both our politics and economics. Or, as Goldsmith put it, “this ultimately lies with the American people.”

YOUR CONCLUDING THOUGHT FROM RECLAIMING AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP:

We reject stagnation and sclerosis. Our aging society has lost its ambition, its appetite for risk, and its interest in the future. We choose instead a youthful determination to carry forward the legacy of our elders, chase away the long shadow of litigation that looms over our efforts, and channel our common resources toward achieving great things.