> taxation. That's much fairer

Extortion is more fair than voluntary contributions? Maybe on arguments from regression but it's not obvious.

> You buy security against large losses at a moderate price

Flood insurance is literally saying "I bet my house is going to be underwater" and winning the big cash price if it is.

Sure, you made an offsetting gamble when buying the house, but I don't see how you can claim a gamble is no longer a gamble when a partially offsetting gamble exists -- that's just two gambles, and indeed prudent risk management when it comes to big gambling.

> taxes are extortion

Then move to North Korea where there are no taxes.

> Flood insurance is literally saying "I bet my house is going to be underwater" and winning the big cash price if it is.

yeah the big prize of all your personal belongings being destroyed, being semi-homeless for an indefinite period of time, fighting insurance companies to get the full value of your home and all assets (glhf finding out what's secretly not covered or you can't prove you owned), searching for a new home in an inflated market, lost productivity, dead pets, etc.. What a prize! This is something you'd expect a 12 year old to try to argue.

Insurance is not legally classified as gambling for very obvious and practical reasons.

> no profit for the organizer

You’ve ruled out not just all gambling but all business. The examples the parent comment above you gave are all profit generating for the organizer.

Insurance in particular seems to be a clear societal win and is in fact gambling. You make a (relatively) small wager that pays out nothing if you don’t need it or potentially huge if you do.

Insurance is moral stewardship, and not unearned gain. In fact, refusing insurance when your neighbors are of the same religion is seen as gambling.

You don’t earn a payout for cancer treatment. It is definitely unearned.

If you paid into the insurance pool, then how is the pay out unearned?

Did you choose to get cancer or fake it?

Paying into insurance does not earn a payout any more than paying into the lottery earns a payout. The payout is determined by random chance.

The point goes like this: you and a neighbor start a business. You each make independent choices on health insurance. When he breaks a leg and can’t work for a while, it’s inconvenient but not burdensome for your shared business. But, you chose not to get health insurance. Your melanoma diagnosis looks like $80,000 which you don’t have. Your business partner has a choice: should he liquidate the business, or act in the long term?

I’m not disputing your “moral stewardship” claim. I’m saying that this doesn’t change the unearned nature of the payout.

If paying into insurance “earns” the payout, then everyone who pays in and doesn’t take a payout is being stolen from.

We're clearly having different views on society. Yours seems through a strict financial lens, but correct me if I'm wrong.

> potentially huge if you do.

No, it isn't. You've just incurred a (probably larger) loss, elsewhere. There's no pay-off. Insurance makes large losses bearable for the individual and society. That's unlike gambling.

“I bet you $500 a month I’ll get cancer.”

Insurance absolutely has a societal benefit. It is also absolutely gambling.

The words for this are hedging and speculation vs gambling.

Amusingly speculation is generally classified differently from investment in that speculation is considered gambling.

Hedging is a strategy for reducing risk in gambling (or investment).

If you made this bet, then got cancer, would you say "hooray, I'm rich!"?

No. But not the definition of gambling.

Insurance is hedging. Aka hedging your bets.

Appeal to definitions is rarely useful in such discussions. Insurance is not a central member of the category, since people rarely get addicted to filing insurance paperwork, but people very much do get addicted to sports betting.

“Is insurance gambling” is a question of definition.

You’re trying to argue that it’s not gambling because it’s beneficial. But that’s absurd because you’re trying to define gambling as specifically “bad” in a conversation of whether gambling is bad.

You can’t argue circularly and then gripe about clarifying definitions.

No, nobody's trying to argue that gambling is by definition bad – that is to say, nobody's defining the category boundaries of "gambling" contingent on possessing the property "is bad". Some people have constrained the definition of "gambling" such that it only contains things they view as bad, and then observed that all the things they consider "gambling" are bad, but that's not the vacuous, circular claim you make it out to be.

In lieu of re-quoting other parts of the thread, I'll instead ask you to please re-read the arguments people have made, more slowly.

Reread your own message.

> Some people have constrained the definition of "gambling" such that it only contains things they view as bad

If there is some internally consistent definition that excludes all the “good” stuff without excluding it specifically for being good, no one has shared that so far as I’ve seen.

The arguments about insurance so far have been “but it’s a good thing” and “you aren’t happy when your insurance pays out”. The former is exactly gambling==bad and the latter is just wrong. I could bet that a politician I despise will win and I won’t necessarily be happy that I won. I’ll be more happy that I got a payout than not, exactly the same as insurance. That’s what a hedge is.

Insurances are not hedges. Hedges are „investment position[s] intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment“ (wikipedia) of which insurances can be a part of, while in an insurance „a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury“ (wikipedia).

Absolutely not the same thing. But even so there is still an interesting insight to be gained from common parlance:

Usually we talk of a bet in a situation where you take an event that is somewhat out of your control and irrelevant for your wellbeing and intentionally and actively make some kind of material outcome for yourself depend on it. In so far speculation at stock markets is „gambly“, you are right about that. And if you have measures in place that hedge the risks of those speculations you might be tempted to very loosely call those your insurance.

If you look however at how the term insurance is typically used you can see a difference there: you insure against risks that are non-avoidable risks of your daily life or business. You do not intentionally and actively enter the cancer-lottery. And you do not actively take measures to win your „health-insurance-bet“ because the outcome is still considered catastrophic, even in case of „winning“ it.

And the way people tend to see things more as insurance vs. bets follows exactly these lines: is it about mitigating a devastating natural risk that is hard or impossible to avoid 100% or is it about something where you actively and intentionally attach your wellbeing to a random event. (We could separate this out in two questions: do you involve yourself actively and intentionally; and: is the outcome that you bet on inherently against your intrinsic interests. But that is a detail that I don‘t think we need to go into)

I think this explains the common parlance quite well: health-insurance: the risk is unavoidable, you do not willfully enter some kind of cancer-lottery on whose outcome you bet. Also you have an intrinsic interest in not „winning“ said „cancer-lottery“. -> no doubt it is insurance.

Legal expenses insurance: risks depend largely on your behaviour but you usually still have an intrinsic interest not having to use it. -> some people might see this as more gambling- or “bet-“ adjacent.

Speculating on one stock and hedging that bet. -> Totally not an insurance. Also not something insurances do. An insurance might be part of your hedge (maybe insurance of freight against loss) but insurers typically do not insure bets. Which makes sense, since part of their business-model is that the customer has an intrinsic interest that the payout case does not occur.

This whole thread started because someone essentially said “gambling is bad” and someone else said “not all gambling is bad; how about X, Y, and Z?” My point here is that if you sit down and define what gambling is in a principled and consistent way, you probably have to conclude that some good things are actually gambling. And that’s cool, because we can also then discuss what kinds of things that “maybe look like gambling” are actually a net positive vs net negative based on their impact rather than some division of “gambling” vs “not gambling” that is fairly arbitrary and leads to bias in how we think of them. You can’t have that kind of conversation if the definition of gambling includes “and it’s bad” because it’s tautological.

In specific response to your reply, I understand what you’re going for but you’re stretching definitions to meet your goals. The Wikipedia page you cite states clearly that insurance is a common hedge. And in your definition of a bet you state that it is “irrelevant for your wellbeing” as if a boxer wagers on their own fight wouldn’t be betting or gambling.

Your discussion of insurance vs bets is reasonable and I get what you’re going for, but I think the distinction is not as clear as it might seem at first. “I don’t want this payout” feels like a meaningful distinction but that Wikipedia page rears its ugly head and points out Hawking’s what-if-black-holes-aren’t-real bet that he wanted to lose. I wanted the Seahawks to win today. If I had put $50 on the Buccaneers would that have been a bet? Insurance? A hedge?

Regardless, back to my point. Maybe there is some criteria that disambiguates all the “good Things that look like gambling but aren’t” from the “bad things that are clearly gambling” but I haven’t seen it yet. I think it’s all some level of gambling. If I roll through life without health insurance, I’m betting I don’t need it. If I buy the insurance I’m betting that at some point I will, or at least that the odds are good enough that I will that I should hedge.

When you walk across the street, you're taking a gamble that a large bear isn't going to come out of nowhere and attack you, for the huge prize payout of safely reaching the other side. Therefore, other things like dog walking and long strolls by the beach are also gambling.