A recent survey of American retail investors reveals concerning trends in how the youngest generation of American adults treats its money. More than half (52%) of Generation Z investors said they had redirected investment money into sports betting over the past year, and 26% of Gen Z investors treat sports betting as an ongoing component of their financial plans.

“So many young people [are] investing and really losing enormous sums of money on what is ultimately a con,” lamented Les Bernal, national director of Stop Predatory Gambling on “Washington Watch.” “Danny Funt, a Washington Post reporter, published a book earlier this year called ‘Everybody Loses.’ And he had a point in there that 99 out of 100 people participating in sports gambling lose money over the long term. … Over the course of their lifetime, it’s going to cause them, you know, irreparable financial harm.”

The survey found that Gen Zers were far more likely than other generations to engage in sports betting and to place it on par with investments. By comparison, 31% of Millennials redirected investment money to sports betting, 10% of Gen Xers, and only 4% of Baby Boomers. Only 14% of Millennials treated sports betting as part of their ongoing financial plan, 6% of Gen Xers, and 1% of Boomers.

The online poll surveyed 1,000 U.S. retail investors across four generations, and the results were published last Wednesday by Betterment, a financial advisory company. Online surveys provide less rigorous results than surveys with randomly generated samples, since the sample is self-selected (but online surveys are also much cheaper to conduct). Additionally, the limited population, “retail investors” instead of “adults,” means the results can only be extrapolated to the subset of adults actively involved in investing. However, the results still provide a helpful snapshot of that population.

Only one-third (36%) of Gen Z investors said they did not participate in sports betting, even though many others said they were open-eyed about the risks. Another quarter (23%) kept the money separate as “fun money.” (Since these categories total 59%, that means at least 11% of Gen Z investors both redirected investment money to sports betting and viewed that money as simply “fun money.”) Another 11% viewed it as a “high-risk strategy,” 15% used sports-betting “to accelerate a goal,” and 14% simply “occasionally redirected” money, with no strategy specified.

The level at which Gen Zers redirect investment money to sports betting suggests that younger investors view the two as roughly equivalent financial options. Bloomberg quoted 32-year-old Robert Kosciuk (whose age would place him in the Millennial generation), who “applies the logic of investing to sports betting,” they wrote.

Multiple factors play a role in explaining this perspective. One is suggested by the survey, which found that Gen Zers were less likely to rely on their own research and judgment when making investment decisions. Only 40% of Gen Zers relied on their own judgment, compared to 69% of Boomers and 56% of investors overall.

Another significant factor is history. The survey defined respondents in Generation Z as those born between 1997 and 2007. This cohort of young adults is not old enough to remember 9/11 or anything that came before. They grew up in an America defined by the Great Recession, high government spending, and a sluggish economy. These conditions combine to give Generation Z greater skepticism toward the economy and investment.

Another aspect of this is that “you have an entire generation of young people who have grown up on their phones,” Bernal described. “They’ve grown up on computers, playing video games. … Most parents have no idea that many video games have gambling-like mechanics designed into these games.” Most young adults are comfortable on their phones, which is where most sports betting takes place.

This factor is compounded by a third: the resurgence of political socialism, which expresses the Marxist ideas many young people were taught in public schools. Near the center of this cocktail is the popular notion that capital profits are bad — that money should not make money, but only labor should make money. (This is expressed in numerous policy ideas, from wealth taxes to minimum wage increases.)

This strikes at the very heart of what investment is: employing money to make money. Young people with this worldview do not understand the value of investment nor understand the important role that capital plays in economic activity. This ignorance of, or hostility to, the value of employing money to make money exacerbates the distrust young Americans feel for investing.

A fourth factor is the way that sports gambling has become normalized, Bernal added. “You see this advertising being run on sporting events: … [the] Super Bowl, the World Cup. They’ve made it perfectly normal today to be betting on sports like that.”

In fact, “the way it’s marketed,” he continued, “they’ve made it so that you’re not a sports fan anymore unless you’re wagering on the game. So, you have an entire group of young men [who] are watching a sporting event, and almost every single one of them now will be wagering on these events. And, if they’re not wagering, they’re the exception. … What they’ve done is made gambling the centerpiece of the American sports life and squeeze the sports around the gambling.”

Bernal argued that the sports gambling problem is downstream from gambling promoted by government. “Government officials of both political parties have been relentlessly promoting extreme forms of gambling to the American people. They’ve been doing it for the last 40 years,” he said. “The public voice of American government today to citizens … in almost every state … is commercialized gambling. …That’s what we advertise to the American people more than anything else. And what we incentivize to the American people — it shapes our character.”

Thus, he advised, for government to have any moral authority to address the sports betting con, it must clean its own house first.