Speculation is not gambling because it deals with uncertainty, not probabilistic risk

Evidence

To a certain extent, our ongoing fascination with the highs and lows of speculative frenzies comes from conflating speculation with “betting”—that is, with risk-taking “for its own sake” and without ambition to generate substantive value. Yet as economists from David Ricardo and Frank Knight to Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes have long demonstrated, reducing speculation to gambling is a mistake because it overlooks the fundamental difference between risk and uncertainty in the behavior of economic agents. Knight’s classic work Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921) posits that (unpredictable) uncertainty characterizes much more economic activity than does (probabilistic) risk. Risk is the concern of gamblers, but most economic and social actors are faced with decisions that are in fact conditioned by uncertainty—that is, by incalculable “outcome probability” (everyday life decisions, the outcomes of which are simply impossible to accurately predict). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 54

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s foundational Knightian distinction: risk as probabilistic vs uncertainty as incalculable — the conceptual core of homo speculans.
• XREF: connects to: Speculation is an imaginative act confronting uncertainty via hedging and wagering — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 85