Kinda hard to TL;DR actually. It's a poetic history of gambling on the future and how every new twist on the practice causes crashes, regulations, etc. And the history goes back to ancient Rome. In conclusion, we haven't mastered predicting the future and mitigating risk but have an unhealthy obsession to do so. The article is so long because it's so poetic.
Would also suggest to anyone interested in this topic to check out anything written by Nassim Taleb. Both of his main stream books are good ("Fooled by Randomness" and "The Black Swan"). Black Swan is more general while Fooled slants towards finance. Peter Bernstein's "Against the Gods" about the history of risk is also great and a little less wordy than Talebs.
