Almost every tech platform is designed to grab your attention and never let it go. You give it clicks, and it gives you dopamine. Games, news updates, social media hits — they all run on the same logic. We can add a new activity to the list: gambling. In just a few years, sports betting has gone from a legal gray area to a mainstream multibillion-dollar industry.

And this isn’t just about sports. It’s about how our economy increasingly exploits our cognitive biases and our irrationality, and how institutions — governments, media companies, even the sports leagues — have partnered in this system, because they all want a cut of the action.

Jonathan Cohen is the author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. It’s a new book about the financial infrastructures that we’ve bu

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