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Matt Gallagher explores how the American Dream’s next evolution is selling a ‘permanent underclass’ a route out of a rat race they won’t ever win

Writing about its fast-food approach to weddings, Joan Didion referred to Las Vegas as “the most extreme and allegorical of America’s settlements”. A place with “no connection to ‘real’ life”.

That hyper-commercialised culture no longer pertains primarily to the Mojave Desert. The electronic stimulation, those frontier promises of cheap prosperity, are now seamlessly accessible on the smartphones of every American across the United States.

Its growing downwardly mobile ‘underclass’ – in part created because of the failures of Wall Street’s own casino culture – can now wager on reality itself through a booming industry of ‘prediction markets’, particularly alluring to young men, promising a golden ticket out of the rat race.