The House Always Wins traces the rise of legal sports betting from a fringe hobby to a $120-billion-a-year industry, reshaping how Americans watch, wager, and lose. Economist and health policy analyst Roger Bate explores how pandemic isolation, relentless digital marketing, and permissive state policy created a perfect storm of opportunity and risk. Bate draws on original surveys, field interviews, and international case studies to reveal how betting moved from racetracks to smartphones — and how a culture built on self-control began to mistake speed for freedom. From suburban bars to billion-dollar platforms like DraftKings and FanDuel, the book uncovers the moral and economic contradictions of a market built on human weakness and where over 95 percent of participants lose, some catastrophically. Bate argues that the challenge is not whether people should gamble, but whether a democracy can manage risk at the speed of an app.

Some appetites are policed; others are promoted. This book asks why societies treat sugar, caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and ultra-processed food so differently — and what the inconsistencies reveal about the interests, incentives, and moral politics behind modern health regulation.

Tobacco policy is caught in a trap of its own making: taxation and prohibition that fuel illicit markets, and resistance to lower-risk alternatives that could reduce harm. The book examines smoking, vaping, and nicotine pouches through the lens of comparative risk — and asks who benefits from the status quo.

Who sets the global health agenda? The book traces donor influence, institutional incentives, and the governance failures of international health bodies — and argues that accountability, not money, is the scarcest resource in global health.