the dice are loaded

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

an idiom meaning that the conditions, circumstances, or rules governing a situation are arranged to favour one outcome or one party over others — that the game is not being played fairly because someone has rigged it in advance; loaded dice are dice that have been weighted or manipulated so that certain faces come up more often than probability alone would dictate, producing biased outcomes that appear random but are in fact predetermined; the phrase is used to describe situations of structural inequality, systemic bias, or corrupt process in which the apparent openness of an outcome — anyone could win — disguises a prior arrangement that makes certain outcomes far more likely than they should be; in epidemiology the phrase resonates because confounding — unmeasured factors that bias the distribution of risk between groups — can make observational studies appear to answer fair questions when in fact the comparison groups are not comparable and the dice are loaded by prior differences

Examples

• Critics argued that the planning system had loaded dice against affordable housing, with every structural incentive pointing toward luxury development.
• When the dice are loaded by socioeconomic deprivation from birth, individual choice cannot fully explain health disparities.