That's still not what the original poster was talking about. I didn't check his numbers, but involuntary partial employment is a thing, and I don't see a reason why those people shouldn't be counted.
I live in an Eastern-European country, and the half-time pause of yesterday's football World Cup opener was more than 75% filled with sports bet adds. This was happening on national television. I can sincerely say that that wasn't the case 10 to 15 years ago.
Let's say we want a nest egg allowing a two-person household to have a retirement income of $60k: quite a bit below the median household income in the US but still considerably above the poverty line, a net positive considering you don't need to work for a living as long as you don't plan for either one of you to live for more than 30 years.
$60k is 75% of $80k, so that nest egg shrinks down to a mere $1.5 million dollars. But you should aim to live on 80% of your pre-retirement salary, so your pre-retirement salary should therefore have been $75k. In order to get there you need to set aside 15% of that $75k household salary (including any 401(k)s) every year, or just shy of $12k, leaving you with $62k actual income after retirement savings or $5.2k per month for the household (you, your spouse, any children, rent, cost of living and savings for emergencies like health, maintenance or replacements).
If that doesn't sound so bad, consider that this is for someone living just above the median and aiming to maintain a similar standard of living. The further your household income is below the median, the more painful those 15% will be and the only reward will be to get to live in the same level of distress just with a more reliable stable income (assuming it doesn't get eaten up by other expenses you couldn't save for or that arise as a consequence of your already low standard of living, e.g. health issues).
So if that's the "best case" prospect, can you imagine why the chance to become a "millionaire" (and remember: a $2 million nest egg represents a $80k retirement income, a good $10k above the median household income) might be more enticing to a significant chunk of the population than the safer more reliable investments that will at best help them maintain their meager standard of living as long as they don't have any unforseen emergencies?
The exact numbers here are entirely irrelevant. Jobs with higher income generally also offer better options for investment and retirement plans, jobs with low income may not even offer a 401(k). Low income also means any expense represents a larger percentage of your income because costs don't scale linearly, especially when it comes to essentials (e.g. gas prices are the same for everyone and a cheap car may actually get worse mileage and require more frequent repairs compared to a newer model that may still be in warranty).
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/retirement/how-much-you-should-...
[2]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-27...
[3]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...
[4]: https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/povert...
While wealthy "whales" exist and the gambling industry likes to portray them all as Saudi oil barons with more money than sense so you don't feel bad about them sinking a few billion dollars into gambling as extravagance because they still come out as billionaires, the truth is the most reliable source of income are people (and for cultural reasons especially men) with a low income who see no career path to "striking it big" and think gambling will work for them because beating the literal odds feels more managable than doing so at the job market.
On my way to work I drive past four gambling halls, including two sports betting places. There's another sports betting machine at a nearby bodega. The cars parking in front of these places aren't fancy, they're average at best. The people coming in and out of these places or discreetly trying to smoke outside without being identified by people who might know them are mostly typical workers, more likely to be immigrants than not, often enthusiastically chatting about their dead-end side-hustles or acquaintances of acquaintances who have "struck it big" but often just end up "reinvesting" their gains and losing it all again.
The gambling halls and sports betting places don't provide entertainment. They provide empty promises. Especially with sports betting the gamblers understand it as a game of skill rather than chance and they think they just have to do good enough to become millionaires.
So assuming you can put together a down payment (possibly 3.5% for FHA loans), and assuming you believe in the long term stability of US economic conditions in general, the boring, responsible path to a quiet, comfortable life continues to work even below median income levels.
(This also assumes good health for most of your life. Certainly many people get the short end of the stick there, but many more simply don't take care of themselves.)
The point isn’t to shame my peers, nor is it that my grandparents generation was without vice, but that maybe there’s something robust about developing a culture of conventional wisdom as a fallback for an increasingly unreliable government? Maybe policy isn’t the only thing that matters?
In a lot of ways things are much more difficult now considering decades of wage stagflation and the wealth inequality globally, and this is before we factor in the recent rise in inflation everywhere. If you're not in a first world country you can raise these problems by an order of magnitude easily. It's not difficult to see how people look to gambling as the last sliver of financial hope