The legalization and popularity of gambling is more than just an immoral activity that has negative societal effects. It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better.
Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing. If hard work or time doesn’t make your life better, then fate is just chance, and you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich, no matter how tiny that likelihood.
In the author’s words, long degeneracy represents “a belief that the world will only get more degenerate, financialized, speculative, lonely, tribal and weird”.
The most concise and holistic explanation of this trend is:
"As real returns compress, risk increases to compensate".
Great post, thanks for linking to that. The prevalence of crypto millionaires is definitely a big factor. Especially for people under 35; when you see your peers becoming rich from essentially random behaviors (like buying the right coin), it really undermines the idea that success is linked to hard work. And that impression funnels back into culture.
I would say gambling in itself isnt immoral. The problem is that a small % of people get addicted and end up spending all their money and more on betting. And that the industry makes almost all their profits on those that are addicted.
Sure, we could get into a discussion on the morality of gambling itself, but if we look at pretty much every global ethical tradition (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, etc.) it is frowned upon strongly. It seems to me like widespread gambling = negative social effects is a pretty widespread, obvious conclusion that most civilizations have reached.
From the wiki page, Christianity from the bible's perspective doesn't have a problem with gambling itself:
> Although the bible does not condemn gambling, instead the desire to get rich is called to account numerous times in the New Testament.
And the Catholic's problem with it is the competition:
> Some parish pastors have also opposed casinos for the additional reason that they would take customers away from church bingo and annual festivals where games such as blackjack, roulette, craps, and poker are used for fundraising.
You left out the entire first half of the section on Catholicism, which is an extremely misleading move on your part:
The Catholic Church holds the position that there is no moral impediment to gambling, so long as it is fair, all bettors have a reasonable chance of winning, there is no fraud involved, and the parties involved do not have actual knowledge of the outcome of the bet (unless they have disclosed this knowledge),[33] and as long as the following conditions are met: the gambler can afford to lose the bet, and stops when the limit is reached, and the motivation is entertainment and not personal gain leading to the "love of money"[34] or making a living.
In general, Catholic bishops have opposed casino gambling on the grounds that it too often tempts people into problem gambling or addiction, and has particularly negative effects on poor people; they sometimes also cite secondary effects such as increases in loan sharking, prostitution, corruption, and general public immorality
> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better.
Broadly speaking I probably agree with their conclusion. But they really should consider savings and investment before donating their money to a betting website - it is pretty much the only choice that is guaranteed to not make their lives better in any way. I can hazard a guess as to the major reason their life isn't improving, they aren't doing anything to make it better. The money supply generally grows at >5% annually in most English speaking countries, find a way to get a slice of that action if nothing else.
If they really can't think of something to do with the money, give it to a friend. Then at least maybe there is some social capital for a rainy day.
The vast, vast majority of people that have gambling problems aren't making rational financial decisions like this. They're doing a habitual activity that is reinforced by bad actors trying to extract as much money from them as possible.
This is especially noticeable with "traditional" offline gambling and lotteries - lower income people play them habitually from a kind of learned helplessness, not as a rational financial strategy.
Sure, seems likely in a lot of cases. But if the starting point is talking about someone who makes chronically irrational decisions then life is going to seem a bit hopeless. The issue isn't as much they're giving up as it is that they aren't making rational decisions.
Thread ancestor was saying "Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing". And I think that the problem here is that the people involved couldn't climb the ladder if you put their hands on it. To climb the ladder of success requires the grip of a rational actor. If someone is gambling then the #1 problem is not the system in itself, but the fact that for whatever reason they don't understand the concept of investment at a fundamental level. Can't help that person by changing gambling policies around. If they aren't going to invest themselves, then at the end of the day they are always going to be dependent on the charity of someone who will, whether they irrationally waste their money on gambling or some other vice.
Your opinion seems to be that poor people are poor because they're irrational, and that systemic things like billion-dollar corporations deliberately feeding them addictive behaviors in order to extract as much money from them as possible, is not actually a factor at all.
I'm sorry but this comment is so out of touch with how poor people (or even people in general) actually function, I don't know what else to say.
I'd be impressed if you can link that back to something I said, I don't think my opinion is that at all. I haven't said anything about poor people, for example.
If someone has enough money that wasting it on gambling is a problem, then they clearly had no business giving up hope because "the system" doesn't have the ability to make their lives better. The system that makes their lives better is the money they just wasted, but invested in something productive.
Someone can't claim to be hopeless about the potential to improve their material comfort when the means to do so was just sitting in their bank account. They have money spare - start spending it to make life better.
I'm happy to accept that gamblers are irrational, but their problem isn't that the system is causing them to give up hope, their problem is that they are irrational gamblers. Sucks to be them, but it isn't anything to do with systemic external factors beyond casino advertising which is quite a specific thing and nothing to do with general hopefulness. Or the quite likely reality that they don't know what opportunity looks like despite it being right in front of them.
You pretty much just repeated the same thing back, so yes, I think that is your opinion.
> If someone has enough money that wasting it on gambling is a problem
They don't have enough money, which is precisely the point. The link I shared shows how lower income people spend dramatically more of their money on lotteries and gambling.
> their problem is that they are irrational gamblers.
How do you think they got that problem? Why do you think they continue to have that problem? It seems to me, that you think it's because they aren't rational enough about managing the money they do have, which...is what you said before: poor people are poor because they're irrational.
You don't seem to factor in the idea that certain groups of people are taken advantage of by bad actors, and that these people become accustomed to this exploitation, and learn helplessness in the face of it.
I think the points I'm making here are pretty obvious truths to anyone that has interacted with / from a lower income background, where gambling, lottery tickets, and other "vices" are widespread. These aren't rational financial decisions, they're consequences of being exploited by more powerful forces.
A working class person addicted to gambling isn't going to suddenly go, "Oh, I should just invest this money into an index fund." That is entirely alien to that culture and group of people. It's not something they were taught, it's not something their friends do, and it's definitely not something the institutions around them are interested in doing.
Now, if you said that, "then the goal should be to educate people so they invest their money and don't just gamble it away," then sure, that's a noble one. But as you said:
Just putting it out there that I have a better grasp of my opinion than you do. Let me try this a different way. Which part of your comment do you think I don't know about/disagree with, and with reference to something I said, why? Let's just pick one thing that you think is clearest, but be specific.
EDIT You'll notice I haven't disagreed with anything you've said so far this thread, apart from where you have mischaracterised my opinions and your attribution of the root cause to hopelessness and lack of opportunity.
> which...is what you said before: poor people are poor because they're irrational.
I left my home country over 10 years ago, and ever since I've travelled back once every 1 or 2 years.
Since 4-5 years ago I started to notice these betting houses cropping up where my family and friends live. They are impossible to miss, with big pictures of different sports and no windows.
The most important thing to notice is where these place are and are not. They proliferate in working class and less well off neighborhoods, while they tend to be absent from more affluent ones.
These places get a lot of foot traffic, all the locals barely making ends meet, blowing a few tens of euros here and there, with the eventual payoff. It's not difficult to hear stories of people getting into the deep end and developing a real addiction with devastating consequences.
And it's not only the business itself, but what they attract. All sort of sketchy characters frequent these places, and tend to attract drugs, violence...
Legal or not these places make the communities they inhabit worse, not better. I personally would be very happy if family didn't have to live exposed to them.
> while they tend to be absent from more affluent ones.
It’s not that they don’t want to be, it’s that affluent neighborhoods tend to keep things that are considered “low class” out of them. The only Safeway in my city that doesn’t sell lottery tickets is the one in the most affluent neighborhood.
Those who already took 99% of the pie can safely bet on every possible outcome.
Most can avoid to lose completely while alive, but they have no path to a winning position, and others are trapped in a situation where it's so hard to go down to a net lost that they lose ability to understand that individual hard work and wiseness is not going to defeat societal asymetries.
Investing is putting money into (hopefully) productive use, like a company with revenue, in an expectation of a return.
Gambling is basically redistributing money according to a random numbers generator, It's a negative sum game (because the house takes its fee), but a surprise positive spike game. That spike forms an addiction in the less fortunate.
Well over a decade ago, when we were initially looking for a place to rent in Bavaria's second-largest city, which is otherwise one of the safest cities in the country and the world, the quickest way to screen neighborhoods was the presence (or absence) of those little casinos/sports betting offices.
It's frustrating because technically it's all "legal" and marketed as harmless entertainment, but in practice it’s just another way to extract money from people who have the least to spare
Maybe their having the least to spare is a consequence, and poor impulse control is the cause.
Anyway, it's like making money off other human deficiencies, say, poor vision or dyslexia, and mistakes made due to those. It feels unfair, it does not feel like a conscious choice. Hence the understandable backlash.
Guilt by association: If, e.g., violence is a problem, then one needs to deal with the violence. In general, law-abiding citizens are—and should—be free to congregate and partake in their bad habits wherever they please. And even though gambling is generally immoral, it does not infringe on anyone else's God-given rights and has no business being made illegal.
Gambling is emphasized above to emphasize we are talking about individuals who are not sufficiently skilled to argue they are not essentially partaking in pure games of chance.
Sports betting is not a game of pure chance, but bookmaking is arguably ethically quite problematic.
Most individuals are going up against these very sophisticated statistical models created by teams of quants working with huge datasets that you have to pay substantial amounts to access. I think most bettors don't know what they're up against.
And the bookie business model is intrinsically anti-consumer: if you win too much then the bookies will ban you. Whereas bookies are quite happy to keep taking money from addicts even when said addicts have already lost their life savings.
And any active investment platforms are not different at all. A lot of matketing budget is spent to make people believe they can earn money by trading.
> Most individuals are going up against these very sophisticated statistical models created by teams of quants working with huge datasets that you have to pay substantial amounts to access.
There are two things you might do as a bookmaker:
(1) Perceive the truth of who is likely to do what, and set odds reflecting that perfect Platonic reality, but with a percentage taken off for yourself.
(2) Adjust the odds you offer over time such that, come the event, the amount you stand to collect on either side will cover the amount you owe to the other side.
You don't need to know the odds to use strategy (2). Nor do you need to reject bettors who are likely to be right.
Strategy (2) doesn't tell you how to come up with the initial prices, and bookies can potentially lose a significant amount from giving "bad" initial prices. If an individual is winning a lot of money from a bookie repeatedly because of these bad initial prices, then it is a sign that they might have a better model than the bookie, and so it is in the bookie's interest to ban them, since sports betting is a zero-sum game: every dollar you win from a bookie is a dollar that the bookie loses.
> If an individual is winning a lot of money from a bookie repeatedly because of these bad initial prices, then it is a sign that they might have a better model than the bookie, and so it is in the bookie's interest to ban them
I don't think this follows. If an individual is winning a lot of money repeatedly in this way, it is a sign that the bookie should give their bets a lot of weight when adjusting prices. But that information is something the bookie might want.
If bookies want better prices they can pay for prices from places that have good models. Or they can buy / build their own models. What you're suggesting doesn't make sense from an economic perspective.
A college fund your parents saved for you isn't your money unless the money is in your name (or possibly set up correctly at the bank). If they just save it in their name, they can spend away as they like. It is their money until it is actually in your name even if you were told it was there as a child.
Which is understandable in many cases if the family actually needs the money before someone goes to college.
Yes, they chose their genes and the structure of their brain after all, how irresponsible of them! /s
In general, something that happens at scale and consistently is not an individual problem.
You have whole armies of very well funded designers of things like processed food, or games, working to deliberate find the faults in human brains, and to make politicians make the laws that lets them do it legally, and you say it's the fault of the individual that falls for it?
Do you think people with a gambling addiction are enjoying it and making an informed choice to continue, and could therefore just choose not to do it instead?
But seriously, mental illness exists. Other sorts of things affect the brain - hormones, cancers, dementia, injuries, etc. Some things really are completely out of your control and no amount of "personal responsibility" is gonna get you out of them nor avoid them.
This argument doesn't account for the inherent, drastic power imbalance between the average participant of gambling and the average owner of a gambling center.
Gambling between people, a basement poker game, that's fine, that's no one's business.
Handing your money over to rich people operating black boxes that are designed from ground up to mesmerize and mind control you into emptying your wallet is a totally other story. On the individual level, it ruins the lives of anyone who is unable to resist or understand the psychological tricks employed on them. Zooming out, it destroys families, communities and in effect, societies.
If we are going to base the legality of gambling on consent and human rights, we have to recognize the limit where consent is no longer valid, due to sickening engagement tactics.
Someone's freedom to make money off of my ignorance or weakness does not supersede my right to self-determination and well-being, neither of which are possible when being hoodwinked by exploitative capitalists.
If we are to continue allowing corporate gambling operations and 24/7 mobile sports betting, we need to place serious restrictions on how these companies are allowed to operate.
The war on drugs should never have happened. It's been used a tool of foreign and domestic terror and control for a century. It was designed and popularized by corrupt people who stood to gain wealth from restricting the freedom of others.
To your implied point, drug addictions similarly ravish communities, destroy lives, and in the case of drugs like fentanyl, legalization effectively makes it easy to acquire extremely potent and discreet poisons, which has a huge potential impact for violence.
We can paint a similar story for gun violence. We can tie drugs, gambling and guns together even more tightly when we look into where cities approve permits for gambling centers, where most liquor stores pop up, selective enforcement and scandals like the Iran-Contra affair [0].
It's important to have a consistent position on all of these topics, so I thank you for raising this point. So all of that said, I think drug consumption/manufacturing/distribution, guns and gambling should generally all be legal at a high level, but we must dispense with the racist and classist implementations of these systems within our societies, and we should have sensible evaluation and certification programs in place for access to different stratifications.
You should be required to periodically prove medical and psychological fitness, as well as operational certification, for certain powerful substances. Similarly, we need sensible restrictions on gambling and guns [1].
The reality is that with freedom comes responsibility. Without responsibility, unrestricted freedom leads to anarchy or a post-capitalist nightmare. One of the main points of government is to balance these freedoms across individuals, communities and society at large, in order to maximize the well-being and self-determination of the people, while allowing for progress and innovation.
[1] To be clear, I am very pro 2nd amendment [1] and am not calling for a ban on anything or for the State to maintain a monopoly on violence and power.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" - Karl Marx
I'm fairly okay with legalizing everything but absolutely banning advertising it.
Which is what we should be doing with gambling: no advertising, as opposed to now where everybody ad break has a celebrity endorsing the intelligence you clearly have when you choose (betting platform).
The emotional manipulation of paid celebrity endorsement of harmful, engagement-hacking products and services is downright sickening, just the thought of how normalized it's become makes me sick to the stomach.
I'm very pro gun, pro freedom of consumption, pro crypto, etc. but once emotional manipulation comes into play, self-determinism goes out the window and people are no longer making free choices.
It’s not about the Gambling, it’s the fact these businesses are collecting a large number of easy victims in once place.
Imagine you’re a loan shark. Which of the following seems like a good place to look for customers: upscale restaurant, movie theater, random bar, theme park, baseball stadium, city park, or a sports betting venue.
Imagine you're a luxury watch thief. Which of the following seems like a good place to look for customers: upscale restaurant, ... or a sports betting venue.
Books most definitely won’t let you win long term. They only want you as long as you’re losing and can ban you once you win too much. This sounds illegal and isn’t.
Is it bad for society? It's certainly bad for individuals, and by extension their families. I guess if it scales up such that a serious chunk of society is affected, then yes its bad for society.
Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.
$x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner.
All those TV ads you see? Funded by losers.
Is it light entertainment? Similar to the cost of a ticket to the game? For some sure. But we understand the chemistry of gambling- it's addictive and compulsive.
If we agree it's generally bad, then what? Lots of things are known to be bad, but are still allowed (smoking and drinking spring to mind, nevermind sugar.)
It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Perhaps ban advertising? Perhaps tax gambling companies way higher (like we do with booze and smokes.) Perhaps treat it as a serious issue?
All of which is unlikely in the US. Business rules, and sports gambling us really good business.
> It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not.
Was not that big of a thing 15 years ago. The goal of a ban is not to reduce the consumption to 0, but try to lower it a significant amount. Although, since people are generally aware of it and participated in it, it might not be that easy to go back to beforetimes.
It doesn't have to be a prohibition either. Advertising could be banned. Branding could be controlled so it isn't appealing (Provider 1, Provider 2, etc). Parlay bets and "innovations" (which burn customer money 10 times faster) could be restricted. The "concierge" service that preys on the big spending addicts could be regulated/erased.
That's the sort of ban that actually works for society, because it is strongly focused on disincentivizing harmful behavior, while shutting out the black market.
I always liked how the offshore casinos would setup a play money casino on their name.net and advertise that on the poker shows. Of course, I imagine a lot of people would put in .com instead and accidentally end up on the real money casino. Whoops.
The other regulation would be acredited gambler thresholds, that limits how much an individual can bet, based on some formula that accounts for a person's income and net worth. You're just not allowed to gamble more than a third of what you legally earned last paycheck or whatever.
Yes, gambling was huge in the US before, you just didn't know about it. Illegal gambling market in the US was massive because you could go offshore. One of the issues with offshore providers is no taxes, no harm prevention, etc.
Legalization allows you to generate tax revenue and implement harm prevention effectively for the very small amount of users that are gambling addicts (if you compare to some of the things that are legal in the US, talking about addiction makes no sense at all...weed, for example, is inherently addictive, gambling is not).
Regardless though, when sports betting was largely illegal in the US, the illegal market was by far the biggest sports betting market in the world. Continuing to make it illegal was extremely illogical.
Genies are tricky to get back in the bottle - especially when you can just as easily go to a company based in the Caymen Islands or wherever and spend that way.
Phones allow you to gamble from anywhere on anything. You could ban advertising it during sports broadcasts, which would probably reduce things a fair bit, but that's likely to impact the "casual" gambler who
I don't do sports, but occasionally I'm in a pub and they are on. I've seen in the UK over the years how pervasive it is now compared to a generation ago. The advertising companies paint this picture of it not only being normal, but also being the only way to enjoy a game. I'm fairly sure that my parents and grandparents who were big into football enjoyed games quite happily in the past.
In the 90s the typical sports gambling in the UK was old men putting the price of a pint on the pools or in a fruit machine, where you guessed which team would win. The winning limit on the fruit machines was about 5 pints worth, and the pools was a confusing weekly maths challenge while listening to results such as "Forfar Four, East Fife Five"
The explosion of "fixed odds betting" machines which dispensed with the social aspect of going to a pub and spending £5 over lunch in favour of extracting £50 in 5 minutes and moving on, combined with general high street abandonment led to a terrible blight on uk town centres. Online gambling meant you no longer had to go into a seedy shop to hand in a betting slip for the 3:40 at doncaster, then wait for an hour or so in the pub next door to watch it with acquaintances, but instead you could do it all from your own home.
Gambling has become industrialised in the last generation, emphasising the cash extraction and reducing the pleasure it brought. It's no longer £3 for an hour of interest, it's become about extracting as much money as possible (and thus the adverts are all about winning big bucks because you as a sports nerd know far more about which player will score first than the betting companies do)
Gambling has always been a part of football. You mentioned the football pools, is this not gambling? Horse racing, not going to mention that?
Conflating fixed odds machines with sports gambling is deliberately disingenuous, it is like comparing a nice glass of water with super skunk weed. Sports gambling is known to have less harm because it is not possible to control many aspects of the experience, unlike with fixed odds machine where the experience is controlled to appeal to addicts. Also, these machines are very heavily regulated, there are categories that separate what places can have them, how the mechanics operate, etc. We have regulation (you seem to be unaware that regulations have changed to limit how much you can wager, you cannot wager £50 in 5 minutes), the problem is purely one of choice.
Online gambling has grown because it is more accessible, and that has meant that a higher proportion of the users are people who didn't want go into a seedy shop and can now put their acca on at the weekend and that is it.
Football pools was also about extracting money from people. The people who ran the pools did not do so because they had an innate love for the human spirit, they did it because people wanted to gamble.
Also, banning advertising would not be a big issue for gambling companies. In the UK, it would be a massive leveller because Paddy Power is able to generate as much revenue as everyone else whilst spending significantly less on advertising. However, the issue is that offshore places would still advertise in the UK and it would significantly incentivize revenue generation from FBOT. If you no longer have big retail participation then you have to rely on addicts to fund the company. This is the first-order effects, past this point it will be different and who knows. But there is an ecosystem that advertising is part of that generates massive revenue, provides significant employment, funds addiction treatment (until 2022, there were no gambling addiction centres funded by the government, it was all funded by providers), and is a generally low-harm product that people enjoy (gambling has been a core part of British culture for decades, what has changed recently is the makeup of British society not gambling).
I do think advertising is the lowest-hanging fruit here. There's no good reason we should be letting sportsbooks run ads during games that are watched by kids
>It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not.
Absolutely asinine statement. Yeah no shit it's not going to deter the most degenerate of gamblers of seeking out a place to make bets. Will it stop apps being advertised on TV and the app stores from grooming new people into it? Yes. Will it stop people mildly curious from betting on sports? Yes.
If "it" in "stop it" is "all sports betting" then no, obviously. If "it" is "sports betting in normal society" then yep, it will stop it. Anyone obfuscating this simple fact wants to make money off of more human misery, remember that.
Remind me of how cigarette usage has gone in nations that ban advertisement of it.
The point OP is making is almost completely unrelated to addiction.
If someone is a gambling addict, they are going to do it. One of the issues with gambling addicts in the US before legalization is that they would use illegal bookmakers, and then get their legs broken. Legalizing is the only way to implement a harm prevention strategy because states regulators can control providers (for example, all states in the US have exclusion lists that they maintain and which providers have to implement, regulators have direct control over operations).
In addition, there is also a lot of evidence that if you regulate ineffectively, you will also cause harm. Hong Kong is a classic example where some forms of gambling are legalized to raise revenue (iirc, very effective, over 10% of total tax revenue) but other forms are banned in order to maximise revenue...addicts are the only users of underground services. Sweden have a state-run gambling operator, that operator provides a bad service (unsurprisingly), again addicts are driven to underground services.
For some reason the general public perceives gambling as both inherently addictive and something that can only be triggered by gambling being legal. Neither of these things are true. Substances are inherently addictive, gambling is not, the proportion of gamblers that are addicted is usually around 1%...of gamblers, not the total population. And it isn't triggered by gambling being legal, it is a real addiction so is present regardless.
> Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.
It's not impossible to beat them consistently, but if you do, they'll limit how much you can bet or just ban you.
There is no reason why they have to provide a fair market to all users. The purpose of the product is entertainment, not financial risk.
There are providers who specialise in providing action to sharps which then sets the prices that retail-facing customers use. If you want to make money, just bet with them. But limiting users is a way to provide a sustainable product. Again, it is an entertainment product, it is not a financial investment.
Also, the quoted text is wrong...gambling companies do not employ lots of mathematicians, I am not sure why people think this...I am not even 100% sure why people think mathematicians are useful, most of the stats used are very basic. But retail providers don't, the prices you see for the biggest lines are provided by third parties, when you make a bet retail providers have no idea what price is being offered to you at that time. The only exception is parlays which are often priced in-house, these lines are very beatable but, again, retail providers limit because the purpose of the product is entertainment. Providers that do business with syndicates do not have lines on parlays because they are so beatable. The protection comes from all users being limited in the amount they can bet on parlays.
A side note is that even in financial markets which are completely open, market makers avoid informed flow. If there was no uninformed flow, there would be no market makers. There has to be an ecosystem. Retail providers exist to buy advertising to win retail users every weekend, to do that they have to run their business in a certain way. There can't be a situation where they just lose money non-stop to fund someone else's business.
I live in a community property state, all of my accounts are owned by the marriage regardless of how they're titled. I would imagine legal debts are similar. There's some exceptions and I suppose gambling debt could be one, but I would expect the default to be that the debt holder could collect from assets held by either spouse.
This will vary greatly from one jurisdiction to another. It can also depend on the specific kind of marriage.
Yes, some marriages are "community of property", some are not. Even in community of property though some debts may be on the individual not the couple.
So one cannot really talk in generalities regarding this.
There's quite a lot of confusion about this question here.
You are right that debt of this type are individual and other parties (spouses, heirs) can't be pursued for it. But it has to be taken into account in a divorce.
Johnny and Janey have a $1m property, $200k savings, $200k retirement between them. They should each get $700k from a divorce (assume they were penniless students when they got together and acquired all the assets during the marriage).
If Janey* wants to stay in the house, she only has to borrow an extra $300k to buy Johnny out. That plus her share of the financial assets, pays for his share of the house.
Now Johnny reveals that he owes half a million in credit card debt that he never told Janey about. She can't just say "That's your problem, it comes out of your share." The marital assets are diminished by that amount before division.
Janey now gets $450k, an even split of the net assets. She has to come up with $550k to keep the house, effectively paying off half of Johnny's gambling debt as well as buying out the difference between the house and the financial assets.
If she doesn't try and keep the house, the cash she gets represents half of the assets minus half the debt. If Johnny owes $2 million, the married couple together are $600k negative. For her to leave the marriage, she has to pay half of this towards Johnny's debts. So she will have to come up with $300k cash to give him, on top of losing all her assets.
Of course, Janey married Johnny for better or worse, and that includes his gambling addiction. But it might feel unfair to Janet, especially if she didn't know about the gambling and couldn't have done anything to stop Johnny running up the debt. And Johnny's lawyer makes sure Johnny dredges up everything he owes in the negotiation, the opposite of the situation with assets where a sharp lawyer might tell Johnny to tread lightly owning up to his gold coins/offshore account. In the worst case Johnny hits Vegas when the divorce seems to be inevitable, knowing that the losses will go into the joint pool, whereas his winnings can be spent on partying or pocketed in cash.
* Divorce participants' behavior is stereotyped by gender. Apologies to all the thrifty houseproud Johnnys and louche deadbeat Janeys out there.
> She has to come up with $550k to keep the house, effectively paying off half of Johnny's gambling debt as well as buying out the difference between the house and the financial assets.
It is even worst - Jane has to pay half those debts even if she dont care about house. If assets minus debt go negative, which they do in case of gamblers, partner is in debt.
That is why the forst advice to partners of gamblers is to divorce asap. Because they easily end up paying for years.
In marriage, stuff you acquire during marriage is "common" no matter which accout you used. The same applies to debt. (Pre existing assets and debts are purely yours).
The common stuff then splits half half unless there was prenup or something.
The role of gambling in society has massively expanded in the past 25 years.
Legalization of sports betting, online poker, and meme cryptocurrencies are all highly visible examples of normalized gambling. Young people increasingly seem to believe that they need to gamble to get anywhere in life.
When traditional paths to financial security feel increasingly out of reach (housing, stable jobs, etc.), it's not surprising that high-risk/high-reward thinking becomes more normalized...
I've found myself getting less interested in sports at all because of how pervasive sports betting has gotten. The announcers are always talking about odds and shilling gambling company sponsors, which is annoying and makes me not want to watch the games.
This less wrong piece by a libertarian who examines the numbers and struggles to reconcile them with his beliefs is one of the best indictments on sports betting.
There is a small proportion of the population who cannot handle this. And they become prey to the predators in the sports betting industry. These guys make money off destroying their lives.
Honestly, it's starting to look more like social media 2.0... like built on engagement, dressed up as entertainment, and slowly warping how people relate to something that used to just be… fun
Why is it any different than betting on the stock market? Buying a house is also a bet. Even if Americans view it as a bad thing, it should be allowed.
Stocks have positive expected returns: the risk premium. Sports bets have negative expected returns in aggregate and if you are good enough to only bet the ones you can spot with positive expected returns they ban you from the platform.
Stocks do not have positive expected return. The return on the average stock is 0% in the US which is negative after fees (this is a common misconception, market returns are positive only because large companies get larger and this is contextual, when this isn't true then even the market will lose money). This is to say nothing of 0DTE options.
There is a risk premium but this premium can be positive or negative. It has been negative in many countries, do you suggest they ban stocks?
I don't think stocks are the same thing as gambling btw. But it is significantly more complex in that they overlap, some financial products clearly exist in the US because gambling was illegal. A sports bet is clearly not an investment, but neither is a ODTE option. Both are entertainment, the former probably more logically so than the latter, I am not sure what appeal that latter can have other than to gambling addicts.
Are you familiar with any? I know people who bet on sports for a living and one of their biggest operational challenges is keeping accounts unbanned long enough to make consistent income.
The odds are manipulated to give the gambling company the advantage. Big winners are identified and dropped. It is designed to drain money from gamblers.
Stocks are not that, in general. A particular fraudulent investment could be that. Crypto investment comes to mind.
I’m not sure what you mean by odds being manipulated. The bookmaker will generally adjust odds to where the money is being placed. Example, in American football if a team opens up as a 7 point favorite and betters put more money on the underdog than the favorite, the line gets smaller so more will take the favorite. Generally the opening line is what the book will think half the betters are willing to place on the favorite, and half on the underdog. Doesn’t always work out that way which is why you see lines move.
Various forms of this have been practiced in traditional casinos for almost a century with increasing sophistication, it’s a well-established art by now.
You don’t need to even win to get banned (limited from making bets larger than a couple of dollars). You just need to make bets that look too smart and might result you winning in the future.
> Why is it any different than betting on the stock market?
We could honestly say gambling and investments were similar - if they typically had similar outcomes.
In late 1990s, I set up two customers (in retirement) with PCs and internet. One was a day trader and the other did online casinos. After a year they were both about as good as their contemporaries.
The day trader made more money than he lost but I don't know how much.
The gambler hid his habit from his wife. He lost their entire retirement savings, maxed out their credit cards, got more cards and maxed those out - and took out 2 mortgages on their formerly paid-for house. It ended their marriage.
Because the outcomes and demographics for sports betting vs the other two show different aggregate money movements and we make judgements about what we consider to be acceptably and unacceptably informed and consenting risk accepting behavior.
I think this is a good question, I’m sorry you’re being downvoted.
I think the difference is that buying/betting on a house or stocks are not a zero-sum game. It is feasible for everyone to buy a house, all the houses to increase in real-world value, and everyone benefit. Likewise with stocks. And on top of that effect, the bets being made are useful for society at large to make better plans, because they are a measure of society’s best predictions. Sports betting on the other hand, is truly zero-sum (although I think you could make an argument that it's actually worse than zero sum). Additionally, it is not useful for society to predict which team will win some set of games. This is just wasted effort on a curiosity. There’s nothing wrong with that effort as entertainment, but it is bad to incentivize our minds to take up sports betting, as opposed to say finance, engineering, art, or anything productive.
I happen to enjoy sports gambling and would be sad to see it disappear.
I'm writing this because I want you to know what you're depriving me of. Because _other_ people make poor decisions, we need to take that decision away from everyone.
I like gambling too, I was very much for legalizing it until it happened and I saw how many lives it's devastated, and how vulnerable young people are to it.
Now I don't give a fuck that banning it would deprive me (or you) of something we happen to enjoy.
How would you feel if we just banned advertising it?
Im all for people like you having the right to make a choice, but the way its advertised rubs me the wrong way.
Kids are encouraged to watch the games which is a bit of a family event. Then during those games, ads are just everywhere for betting. Then theres a "18+ only" fine print.
We banned cigarette advertisements during sports and I would say we are better for it, but I wouldn't call to ban smoking.
This is just the same social contract you agree to in every part of your life.
Why can't you legally drive over 100 mph when you know you'd do it safely?
Why can't you own certain kinds of weapons when you know you don't want to kill anyone or yourself?
Gamblers going bankrupt is bad for all of us because they often have families and creditors who are harmed by the loss of the money, and the rest of us pay the price in the form of welfare, loss wages, etc.
The entire business model depends on most people losing, and those losses often come from people who can't afford it, the industry is structured to aggressively market, addict, and exploit psychological weaknesses, it's engineered dependence
> Because _other_ people make poor decisions, we need to take that decision away from everyone.
Sports betting is to entertainment what ultra-processed food is to nutrition, engineered to be addictive, marketed as "pleasure" and technically a personal choice, but built on exploiting human psychology
You can enjoy a burger or a bet responsibly, sure, but the problem is the systemic design, it's optimized for overconsumption and dependency, not well being, you end up creating problems whole society have to pay for it, it's systemic harm
Isnt the root problem a company being able to A/B test the most addictive product? They spent huge amount of money to find all the psychological tricks, to identify who has gambling potential and then target those people.
Education wont beat that. Gambling is not a rational decision in the first place.
But, young men gambling (they are the primary target demographic) will make them into desperate and hopeless group. And not just financially, marrying or dating gambler is even bigger mistake then partnering with an alcoholic. Their lives will go down the drain in all aspects.
That's always an interesting thing. Where does autonomy end and the right of the government to intrude into your private life begin. The bottom line, that something is bad for you seems to be so logical. But when you think about it a bit longer you see that there are so many things that are bad for you that it would be next to impossible to regulate all of them. Ok, so you only do it for the things that are really harmful. But then you're still left with smoking, alcohol, obesity, the state's lottery and casinos (always legal, for some weird reason, but just as bad as other forms of gambling), parachute jumping, social media, free climbing and a whole raft of other items that have the potential to massively ruin your (or even someone else's) life. And then there are the things you could do but that are illegal, such as speeding and drinking and then getting into the driver's seat of a vehicle.
I find this one of the most difficult to answer questions about how you should run a society. In practice, we aim to curb the excesses and treat them as if they are illnesses but even that does not stop the damage. In the end it is an education problem. People are not taught to deal with a massive menu of options for addiction and oblivion, while at the same time their lives are structurally manipulated to select them for that addiction.
In the UK for instance, where sports betting is legal (and in some other EU countries as well) it is a real problem. But the parties that make money of it (and who prey mostly on the poor) are so wealthy and politically connected that even if the bulk of the people would be against it I doubt something could be done about it. If it were made illegal it would still continue, but underground. It's really just another tax on the poor.
Sports betting is problematic for the sports too. It causes people to throw matches for money and it exposes athletes to danger and claims of purposefully throwing matches when that might not be the case. This isn't a new thing ( https://apnews.com/article/sports-betting-scandals-1a59b8bee... ), it is essentially as old as the sports themselves.
Generally, I take a realist perspective on this. The line is wherever the people who wield power want it to be given their understanding of their self-interest. Any talk of "should" is a rhetorical exercise to convince people that it's in their self-interest to join you and oppose the thing.
Gambling companies have engineered sophisticated addiction machines that exploit the brain's weaknesses, so it's very different to most of the other things you listed. They also deliberately prey on the people most susceptible to getting addicted, and even engage in extremely predatory behaviour like giving high-risk targets all sorts of "free" perks and benefits in order to keep them gambling for as long and much as possible. I can't find it now, but a few months ago on HN was an article about one of these systems, where the gambler got a dedicated "advisor" that was giving them things like free rolls, free tokens to gamble with, free alcohol and even accomodations, all because they know the addicts will keep gambling and use their own money inevitably. They then ban people who are gambling too "smartly" or even just on lucky win streaks from participating in their "games".
Smoking is a great example and an almost 1:1 parallel to what's happening with gambling, they had teams of people and even paid off scientists to fabricate studies about the health benefits of smoking, and then used deceptive marketing that was very carefully crafted to ensure people tried it out, and the product itself is just inherently addictive. They ensured they can capture the next generation by specifically tailoring their adverts towards children and getting them curious to try tobacco.
As a result most of the world has banned tobacco advertising, and a lot of places are doing things like enforcing ugly generic packaging with extreme health issues plastered on the boxes, exorbitant prices & taxes on tobacco because of what Big Tobacco did.
Gambling should be treated the exact same as tobacco is and was. Advertising it should never be allowed in any context whatsoever, and the gambling spots and apps should have disclaimers all over the place indicating the dangers of it. Additionally, the actual companies should be heavily regulated to not be allowed to offer "perks" and to also not be allowed to pick who can play or not.
Gambling, like most things, is simply something that will always be a thing, so just like tobacco and alcohol it shouldn't be banned outright. That doesn't mean we need to let predatory practices proliferate. Nothing is stopping us from making gambling as unattractive as we reasonably can, both for the gamblers and the gambling companies. There will still be gambling, but just like tobacco there will be a lot less people doing it, and at that point the ones that are are at least as protected and informed as possible.
The legalization and popularity of gambling is more than just an immoral activity that has negative societal effects. It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better.
Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing. If hard work or time doesn’t make your life better, then fate is just chance, and you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich, no matter how tiny that likelihood.
https://oldcoinbad.com/p/long-degeneracy
In the author’s words, long degeneracy represents “a belief that the world will only get more degenerate, financialized, speculative, lonely, tribal and weird”.
The most concise and holistic explanation of this trend is:
"As real returns compress, risk increases to compensate".
Great post, thanks for linking to that. The prevalence of crypto millionaires is definitely a big factor. Especially for people under 35; when you see your peers becoming rich from essentially random behaviors (like buying the right coin), it really undermines the idea that success is linked to hard work. And that impression funnels back into culture.
I would say gambling in itself isnt immoral. The problem is that a small % of people get addicted and end up spending all their money and more on betting. And that the industry makes almost all their profits on those that are addicted.
Sure, we could get into a discussion on the morality of gambling itself, but if we look at pretty much every global ethical tradition (Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, etc.) it is frowned upon strongly. It seems to me like widespread gambling = negative social effects is a pretty widespread, obvious conclusion that most civilizations have reached.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambling#Religious_views
From the wiki page, Christianity from the bible's perspective doesn't have a problem with gambling itself:
> Although the bible does not condemn gambling, instead the desire to get rich is called to account numerous times in the New Testament.
And the Catholic's problem with it is the competition:
> Some parish pastors have also opposed casinos for the additional reason that they would take customers away from church bingo and annual festivals where games such as blackjack, roulette, craps, and poker are used for fundraising.
You left out the entire first half of the section on Catholicism, which is an extremely misleading move on your part:
The Catholic Church holds the position that there is no moral impediment to gambling, so long as it is fair, all bettors have a reasonable chance of winning, there is no fraud involved, and the parties involved do not have actual knowledge of the outcome of the bet (unless they have disclosed this knowledge),[33] and as long as the following conditions are met: the gambler can afford to lose the bet, and stops when the limit is reached, and the motivation is entertainment and not personal gain leading to the "love of money"[34] or making a living.
In general, Catholic bishops have opposed casino gambling on the grounds that it too often tempts people into problem gambling or addiction, and has particularly negative effects on poor people; they sometimes also cite secondary effects such as increases in loan sharking, prostitution, corruption, and general public immorality
> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better.
Broadly speaking I probably agree with their conclusion. But they really should consider savings and investment before donating their money to a betting website - it is pretty much the only choice that is guaranteed to not make their lives better in any way. I can hazard a guess as to the major reason their life isn't improving, they aren't doing anything to make it better. The money supply generally grows at >5% annually in most English speaking countries, find a way to get a slice of that action if nothing else.
If they really can't think of something to do with the money, give it to a friend. Then at least maybe there is some social capital for a rainy day.
The post you replied too says, "they have no hope," so they toss their money away on a chance, the last unit resembling hope.
The solution is enabling hope. Your solution is to ignore that entire aspect and accept they have no hope and to be more pragmatic with their money.
It is like telling a depressed person they should try being happy.
The vast, vast majority of people that have gambling problems aren't making rational financial decisions like this. They're doing a habitual activity that is reinforced by bad actors trying to extract as much money from them as possible.
This is especially noticeable with "traditional" offline gambling and lotteries - lower income people play them habitually from a kind of learned helplessness, not as a rational financial strategy.
https://fortune.com/2024/04/04/lottery-tickets-poor-rich-inc...
Sure, seems likely in a lot of cases. But if the starting point is talking about someone who makes chronically irrational decisions then life is going to seem a bit hopeless. The issue isn't as much they're giving up as it is that they aren't making rational decisions.
Thread ancestor was saying "Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing". And I think that the problem here is that the people involved couldn't climb the ladder if you put their hands on it. To climb the ladder of success requires the grip of a rational actor. If someone is gambling then the #1 problem is not the system in itself, but the fact that for whatever reason they don't understand the concept of investment at a fundamental level. Can't help that person by changing gambling policies around. If they aren't going to invest themselves, then at the end of the day they are always going to be dependent on the charity of someone who will, whether they irrationally waste their money on gambling or some other vice.
Your opinion seems to be that poor people are poor because they're irrational, and that systemic things like billion-dollar corporations deliberately feeding them addictive behaviors in order to extract as much money from them as possible, is not actually a factor at all.
I'm sorry but this comment is so out of touch with how poor people (or even people in general) actually function, I don't know what else to say.
> Your opinion seems to be...
I'd be impressed if you can link that back to something I said, I don't think my opinion is that at all. I haven't said anything about poor people, for example.
If someone has enough money that wasting it on gambling is a problem, then they clearly had no business giving up hope because "the system" doesn't have the ability to make their lives better. The system that makes their lives better is the money they just wasted, but invested in something productive.
Someone can't claim to be hopeless about the potential to improve their material comfort when the means to do so was just sitting in their bank account. They have money spare - start spending it to make life better.
I'm happy to accept that gamblers are irrational, but their problem isn't that the system is causing them to give up hope, their problem is that they are irrational gamblers. Sucks to be them, but it isn't anything to do with systemic external factors beyond casino advertising which is quite a specific thing and nothing to do with general hopefulness. Or the quite likely reality that they don't know what opportunity looks like despite it being right in front of them.
You pretty much just repeated the same thing back, so yes, I think that is your opinion.
> If someone has enough money that wasting it on gambling is a problem
They don't have enough money, which is precisely the point. The link I shared shows how lower income people spend dramatically more of their money on lotteries and gambling.
> their problem is that they are irrational gamblers.
How do you think they got that problem? Why do you think they continue to have that problem? It seems to me, that you think it's because they aren't rational enough about managing the money they do have, which...is what you said before: poor people are poor because they're irrational.
You don't seem to factor in the idea that certain groups of people are taken advantage of by bad actors, and that these people become accustomed to this exploitation, and learn helplessness in the face of it.
I think the points I'm making here are pretty obvious truths to anyone that has interacted with / from a lower income background, where gambling, lottery tickets, and other "vices" are widespread. These aren't rational financial decisions, they're consequences of being exploited by more powerful forces.
A working class person addicted to gambling isn't going to suddenly go, "Oh, I should just invest this money into an index fund." That is entirely alien to that culture and group of people. It's not something they were taught, it's not something their friends do, and it's definitely not something the institutions around them are interested in doing.
Now, if you said that, "then the goal should be to educate people so they invest their money and don't just gamble it away," then sure, that's a noble one. But as you said:
> Sucks to be them
Just putting it out there that I have a better grasp of my opinion than you do. Let me try this a different way. Which part of your comment do you think I don't know about/disagree with, and with reference to something I said, why? Let's just pick one thing that you think is clearest, but be specific.
EDIT You'll notice I haven't disagreed with anything you've said so far this thread, apart from where you have mischaracterised my opinions and your attribution of the root cause to hopelessness and lack of opportunity.
> which...is what you said before: poor people are poor because they're irrational.
I didn't say that.
I left my home country over 10 years ago, and ever since I've travelled back once every 1 or 2 years.
Since 4-5 years ago I started to notice these betting houses cropping up where my family and friends live. They are impossible to miss, with big pictures of different sports and no windows.
The most important thing to notice is where these place are and are not. They proliferate in working class and less well off neighborhoods, while they tend to be absent from more affluent ones.
These places get a lot of foot traffic, all the locals barely making ends meet, blowing a few tens of euros here and there, with the eventual payoff. It's not difficult to hear stories of people getting into the deep end and developing a real addiction with devastating consequences.
And it's not only the business itself, but what they attract. All sort of sketchy characters frequent these places, and tend to attract drugs, violence...
Legal or not these places make the communities they inhabit worse, not better. I personally would be very happy if family didn't have to live exposed to them.
> while they tend to be absent from more affluent ones.
It’s not that they don’t want to be, it’s that affluent neighborhoods tend to keep things that are considered “low class” out of them. The only Safeway in my city that doesn’t sell lottery tickets is the one in the most affluent neighborhood.
I bet the better off do gamble on the financial markets though
Those who already took 99% of the pie can safely bet on every possible outcome.
Most can avoid to lose completely while alive, but they have no path to a winning position, and others are trapped in a situation where it's so hard to go down to a net lost that they lose ability to understand that individual hard work and wiseness is not going to defeat societal asymetries.
Except everyone on financial markets try to sell idea that you can "learn" and actively trade on their platforma and make living of it.
Which make it no diffetent for average Joe than gambling.
Plus it's fun and "dangerous" to slum it with the plebs on occasion. But you don't want that shit close to where you live.
When they do it, it's gambling. When we do it, it's investing.
Investing is putting money into (hopefully) productive use, like a company with revenue, in an expectation of a return.
Gambling is basically redistributing money according to a random numbers generator, It's a negative sum game (because the house takes its fee), but a surprise positive spike game. That spike forms an addiction in the less fortunate.
The difference is investing has a positive expected return. Betting against the house does not.
Well over a decade ago, when we were initially looking for a place to rent in Bavaria's second-largest city, which is otherwise one of the safest cities in the country and the world, the quickest way to screen neighborhoods was the presence (or absence) of those little casinos/sports betting offices.
It's frustrating because technically it's all "legal" and marketed as harmless entertainment, but in practice it’s just another way to extract money from people who have the least to spare
Maybe their having the least to spare is a consequence, and poor impulse control is the cause.
Anyway, it's like making money off other human deficiencies, say, poor vision or dyslexia, and mistakes made due to those. It feels unfair, it does not feel like a conscious choice. Hence the understandable backlash.
Guilt by association: If, e.g., violence is a problem, then one needs to deal with the violence. In general, law-abiding citizens are—and should—be free to congregate and partake in their bad habits wherever they please. And even though gambling is generally immoral, it does not infringe on anyone else's God-given rights and has no business being made illegal.
Gambling is emphasized above to emphasize we are talking about individuals who are not sufficiently skilled to argue they are not essentially partaking in pure games of chance.
> And even though gambling is generally immoral, it does not infringe on anyone else's God-given rights and has no business being made illegal.
Neither does smoking, but we still limit the types of advertisements cigarette companies can make.
Gambling is ultimately a predatory business that serves to separate people susceptible to addiction from their money.
> Neither does smoking
It absolutely does, and the number of people that died from second hand smoke is awful.
It doesn't make sport gambling adverts right, but it wasn't a great example.
In a similar vein, many people close to gamblers suffer serious consequences from the addiction.
Indeed. Gambling impacts the family when they spend other people's money.
We have every right to ban things that are abusive to society.
Sports betting is not a game of pure chance, but bookmaking is arguably ethically quite problematic.
Most individuals are going up against these very sophisticated statistical models created by teams of quants working with huge datasets that you have to pay substantial amounts to access. I think most bettors don't know what they're up against.
And the bookie business model is intrinsically anti-consumer: if you win too much then the bookies will ban you. Whereas bookies are quite happy to keep taking money from addicts even when said addicts have already lost their life savings.
The whole "sports betting is a skill game" angle is technically true in theory, but in practice it's like showing up to a Formula 1 race on a tricycle
And any active investment platforms are not different at all. A lot of matketing budget is spent to make people believe they can earn money by trading.
> Most individuals are going up against these very sophisticated statistical models created by teams of quants working with huge datasets that you have to pay substantial amounts to access.
There are two things you might do as a bookmaker:
(1) Perceive the truth of who is likely to do what, and set odds reflecting that perfect Platonic reality, but with a percentage taken off for yourself.
(2) Adjust the odds you offer over time such that, come the event, the amount you stand to collect on either side will cover the amount you owe to the other side.
You don't need to know the odds to use strategy (2). Nor do you need to reject bettors who are likely to be right.
Strategy (2) doesn't tell you how to come up with the initial prices, and bookies can potentially lose a significant amount from giving "bad" initial prices. If an individual is winning a lot of money from a bookie repeatedly because of these bad initial prices, then it is a sign that they might have a better model than the bookie, and so it is in the bookie's interest to ban them, since sports betting is a zero-sum game: every dollar you win from a bookie is a dollar that the bookie loses.
> If an individual is winning a lot of money from a bookie repeatedly because of these bad initial prices, then it is a sign that they might have a better model than the bookie, and so it is in the bookie's interest to ban them
I don't think this follows. If an individual is winning a lot of money repeatedly in this way, it is a sign that the bookie should give their bets a lot of weight when adjusting prices. But that information is something the bookie might want.
If bookies want better prices they can pay for prices from places that have good models. Or they can buy / build their own models. What you're suggesting doesn't make sense from an economic perspective.
> it does not infringe on anyone else's God-given rights
Gamblers have lost their homes as a result of their addiction, I think that impact on their families counts for something.
Maybe the family should blame the degenerate gambler. You know, a little personal responsibility. Not a common thing these days.
So if your degenerate father gambles away your college fund, that's your personal responsibility?
Society already has rules against stealing other people's money.
A college fund your parents saved for you isn't your money unless the money is in your name (or possibly set up correctly at the bank). If they just save it in their name, they can spend away as they like. It is their money until it is actually in your name even if you were told it was there as a child.
Which is understandable in many cases if the family actually needs the money before someone goes to college.
Yes, they chose their genes and the structure of their brain after all, how irresponsible of them! /s
In general, something that happens at scale and consistently is not an individual problem.
You have whole armies of very well funded designers of things like processed food, or games, working to deliberate find the faults in human brains, and to make politicians make the laws that lets them do it legally, and you say it's the fault of the individual that falls for it?
Blaming genes and the “structure of your brain” is precisely what people without a sense of personal responsibility do.
Do you think people with a gambling addiction are enjoying it and making an informed choice to continue, and could therefore just choose not to do it instead?
Sure. Also blaming individual for consequences for societal constructe they fall into is typical of those who lake any sense of social responsibility.
I hope you can see how this kind of argument on themselves don't make anyone extend their perspective if no one challenge its own preconceptions.
There is no such thing as society.
There is no such thing as individual, only a collection of cells. And no such thing as cells, just a bunch of atoms...
Sure, some of them do that.
But seriously, mental illness exists. Other sorts of things affect the brain - hormones, cancers, dementia, injuries, etc. Some things really are completely out of your control and no amount of "personal responsibility" is gonna get you out of them nor avoid them.
You have far less control over things than you may think.
This argument doesn't account for the inherent, drastic power imbalance between the average participant of gambling and the average owner of a gambling center.
Gambling between people, a basement poker game, that's fine, that's no one's business.
Handing your money over to rich people operating black boxes that are designed from ground up to mesmerize and mind control you into emptying your wallet is a totally other story. On the individual level, it ruins the lives of anyone who is unable to resist or understand the psychological tricks employed on them. Zooming out, it destroys families, communities and in effect, societies.
If we are going to base the legality of gambling on consent and human rights, we have to recognize the limit where consent is no longer valid, due to sickening engagement tactics.
Someone's freedom to make money off of my ignorance or weakness does not supersede my right to self-determination and well-being, neither of which are possible when being hoodwinked by exploitative capitalists.
If we are to continue allowing corporate gambling operations and 24/7 mobile sports betting, we need to place serious restrictions on how these companies are allowed to operate.
I'm curious how do you feel about drug legalization.
The war on drugs should never have happened. It's been used a tool of foreign and domestic terror and control for a century. It was designed and popularized by corrupt people who stood to gain wealth from restricting the freedom of others.
To your implied point, drug addictions similarly ravish communities, destroy lives, and in the case of drugs like fentanyl, legalization effectively makes it easy to acquire extremely potent and discreet poisons, which has a huge potential impact for violence.
We can paint a similar story for gun violence. We can tie drugs, gambling and guns together even more tightly when we look into where cities approve permits for gambling centers, where most liquor stores pop up, selective enforcement and scandals like the Iran-Contra affair [0].
It's important to have a consistent position on all of these topics, so I thank you for raising this point. So all of that said, I think drug consumption/manufacturing/distribution, guns and gambling should generally all be legal at a high level, but we must dispense with the racist and classist implementations of these systems within our societies, and we should have sensible evaluation and certification programs in place for access to different stratifications.
You should be required to periodically prove medical and psychological fitness, as well as operational certification, for certain powerful substances. Similarly, we need sensible restrictions on gambling and guns [1].
The reality is that with freedom comes responsibility. Without responsibility, unrestricted freedom leads to anarchy or a post-capitalist nightmare. One of the main points of government is to balance these freedoms across individuals, communities and society at large, in order to maximize the well-being and self-determination of the people, while allowing for progress and innovation.
I'm curious to hear your own position.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
[1] To be clear, I am very pro 2nd amendment [1] and am not calling for a ban on anything or for the State to maintain a monopoly on violence and power.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" - Karl Marx
I'm fairly okay with legalizing everything but absolutely banning advertising it.
Which is what we should be doing with gambling: no advertising, as opposed to now where everybody ad break has a celebrity endorsing the intelligence you clearly have when you choose (betting platform).
The emotional manipulation of paid celebrity endorsement of harmful, engagement-hacking products and services is downright sickening, just the thought of how normalized it's become makes me sick to the stomach.
I'm very pro gun, pro freedom of consumption, pro crypto, etc. but once emotional manipulation comes into play, self-determinism goes out the window and people are no longer making free choices.
It’s not about the Gambling, it’s the fact these businesses are collecting a large number of easy victims in once place.
Imagine you’re a loan shark. Which of the following seems like a good place to look for customers: upscale restaurant, movie theater, random bar, theme park, baseball stadium, city park, or a sports betting venue.
Imagine you're a luxury watch thief. Which of the following seems like a good place to look for customers: upscale restaurant, ... or a sports betting venue.
https://robbreport.com/style/watch-collector/luxury-watch-th...
Being somewhat skilled does not make it not hazard. And practices of books are purely predatory.
Books most definitely won’t let you win long term. They only want you as long as you’re losing and can ban you once you win too much. This sounds illegal and isn’t.
Discussion 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45432627
Do you mean hazard as danger or hazard as luck/random?
Is it bad for society? It's certainly bad for individuals, and by extension their families. I guess if it scales up such that a serious chunk of society is affected, then yes its bad for society.
Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.
$x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner.
All those TV ads you see? Funded by losers.
Is it light entertainment? Similar to the cost of a ticket to the game? For some sure. But we understand the chemistry of gambling- it's addictive and compulsive.
If we agree it's generally bad, then what? Lots of things are known to be bad, but are still allowed (smoking and drinking spring to mind, nevermind sugar.)
It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not. Perhaps ban advertising? Perhaps tax gambling companies way higher (like we do with booze and smokes.) Perhaps treat it as a serious issue?
All of which is unlikely in the US. Business rules, and sports gambling us really good business.
Gambling used to be so illegal in the US that it used its global Internet jurisdiction to shut down poker companies located outside the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
And yet every bar I go to, as far back as I can remember, has slot machines and somehow that doesn't count? Even gas stations. Never understood this.
> It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not.
Was not that big of a thing 15 years ago. The goal of a ban is not to reduce the consumption to 0, but try to lower it a significant amount. Although, since people are generally aware of it and participated in it, it might not be that easy to go back to beforetimes.
It doesn't have to be a prohibition either. Advertising could be banned. Branding could be controlled so it isn't appealing (Provider 1, Provider 2, etc). Parlay bets and "innovations" (which burn customer money 10 times faster) could be restricted. The "concierge" service that preys on the big spending addicts could be regulated/erased.
That's the sort of ban that actually works for society, because it is strongly focused on disincentivizing harmful behavior, while shutting out the black market.
> Advertising could be banned.
I always liked how the offshore casinos would setup a play money casino on their name.net and advertise that on the poker shows. Of course, I imagine a lot of people would put in .com instead and accidentally end up on the real money casino. Whoops.
The other regulation would be acredited gambler thresholds, that limits how much an individual can bet, based on some formula that accounts for a person's income and net worth. You're just not allowed to gamble more than a third of what you legally earned last paycheck or whatever.
Yes, gambling was huge in the US before, you just didn't know about it. Illegal gambling market in the US was massive because you could go offshore. One of the issues with offshore providers is no taxes, no harm prevention, etc.
Legalization allows you to generate tax revenue and implement harm prevention effectively for the very small amount of users that are gambling addicts (if you compare to some of the things that are legal in the US, talking about addiction makes no sense at all...weed, for example, is inherently addictive, gambling is not).
Regardless though, when sports betting was largely illegal in the US, the illegal market was by far the biggest sports betting market in the world. Continuing to make it illegal was extremely illogical.
Genies are tricky to get back in the bottle - especially when you can just as easily go to a company based in the Caymen Islands or wherever and spend that way.
Phones allow you to gamble from anywhere on anything. You could ban advertising it during sports broadcasts, which would probably reduce things a fair bit, but that's likely to impact the "casual" gambler who
I don't do sports, but occasionally I'm in a pub and they are on. I've seen in the UK over the years how pervasive it is now compared to a generation ago. The advertising companies paint this picture of it not only being normal, but also being the only way to enjoy a game. I'm fairly sure that my parents and grandparents who were big into football enjoyed games quite happily in the past.
In the 90s the typical sports gambling in the UK was old men putting the price of a pint on the pools or in a fruit machine, where you guessed which team would win. The winning limit on the fruit machines was about 5 pints worth, and the pools was a confusing weekly maths challenge while listening to results such as "Forfar Four, East Fife Five"
The explosion of "fixed odds betting" machines which dispensed with the social aspect of going to a pub and spending £5 over lunch in favour of extracting £50 in 5 minutes and moving on, combined with general high street abandonment led to a terrible blight on uk town centres. Online gambling meant you no longer had to go into a seedy shop to hand in a betting slip for the 3:40 at doncaster, then wait for an hour or so in the pub next door to watch it with acquaintances, but instead you could do it all from your own home.
Gambling has become industrialised in the last generation, emphasising the cash extraction and reducing the pleasure it brought. It's no longer £3 for an hour of interest, it's become about extracting as much money as possible (and thus the adverts are all about winning big bucks because you as a sports nerd know far more about which player will score first than the betting companies do)
Gambling has always been a part of football. You mentioned the football pools, is this not gambling? Horse racing, not going to mention that?
Conflating fixed odds machines with sports gambling is deliberately disingenuous, it is like comparing a nice glass of water with super skunk weed. Sports gambling is known to have less harm because it is not possible to control many aspects of the experience, unlike with fixed odds machine where the experience is controlled to appeal to addicts. Also, these machines are very heavily regulated, there are categories that separate what places can have them, how the mechanics operate, etc. We have regulation (you seem to be unaware that regulations have changed to limit how much you can wager, you cannot wager £50 in 5 minutes), the problem is purely one of choice.
Online gambling has grown because it is more accessible, and that has meant that a higher proportion of the users are people who didn't want go into a seedy shop and can now put their acca on at the weekend and that is it.
Football pools was also about extracting money from people. The people who ran the pools did not do so because they had an innate love for the human spirit, they did it because people wanted to gamble.
Also, banning advertising would not be a big issue for gambling companies. In the UK, it would be a massive leveller because Paddy Power is able to generate as much revenue as everyone else whilst spending significantly less on advertising. However, the issue is that offshore places would still advertise in the UK and it would significantly incentivize revenue generation from FBOT. If you no longer have big retail participation then you have to rely on addicts to fund the company. This is the first-order effects, past this point it will be different and who knows. But there is an ecosystem that advertising is part of that generates massive revenue, provides significant employment, funds addiction treatment (until 2022, there were no gambling addiction centres funded by the government, it was all funded by providers), and is a generally low-harm product that people enjoy (gambling has been a core part of British culture for decades, what has changed recently is the makeup of British society not gambling).
I do think advertising is the lowest-hanging fruit here. There's no good reason we should be letting sportsbooks run ads during games that are watched by kids
>It could be banned. Would that stop it? Probably not.
Absolutely asinine statement. Yeah no shit it's not going to deter the most degenerate of gamblers of seeking out a place to make bets. Will it stop apps being advertised on TV and the app stores from grooming new people into it? Yes. Will it stop people mildly curious from betting on sports? Yes.
If "it" in "stop it" is "all sports betting" then no, obviously. If "it" is "sports betting in normal society" then yep, it will stop it. Anyone obfuscating this simple fact wants to make money off of more human misery, remember that.
Remind me of how cigarette usage has gone in nations that ban advertisement of it.
The point OP is making is almost completely unrelated to addiction.
If someone is a gambling addict, they are going to do it. One of the issues with gambling addicts in the US before legalization is that they would use illegal bookmakers, and then get their legs broken. Legalizing is the only way to implement a harm prevention strategy because states regulators can control providers (for example, all states in the US have exclusion lists that they maintain and which providers have to implement, regulators have direct control over operations).
In addition, there is also a lot of evidence that if you regulate ineffectively, you will also cause harm. Hong Kong is a classic example where some forms of gambling are legalized to raise revenue (iirc, very effective, over 10% of total tax revenue) but other forms are banned in order to maximise revenue...addicts are the only users of underground services. Sweden have a state-run gambling operator, that operator provides a bad service (unsurprisingly), again addicts are driven to underground services.
For some reason the general public perceives gambling as both inherently addictive and something that can only be triggered by gambling being legal. Neither of these things are true. Substances are inherently addictive, gambling is not, the proportion of gamblers that are addicted is usually around 1%...of gamblers, not the total population. And it isn't triggered by gambling being legal, it is a real addiction so is present regardless.
I'm imagining mandatory disclosures like on cigarette packs, except it's some distribution chart or percentile figure for bankruptcy.
> Let's start with the obvious- in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss. The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.
It's not impossible to beat them consistently, but if you do, they'll limit how much you can bet or just ban you.
Seems like an easy solution is just to ban them from banning winners.
Regulate them
There is no reason why they have to provide a fair market to all users. The purpose of the product is entertainment, not financial risk.
There are providers who specialise in providing action to sharps which then sets the prices that retail-facing customers use. If you want to make money, just bet with them. But limiting users is a way to provide a sustainable product. Again, it is an entertainment product, it is not a financial investment.
Also, the quoted text is wrong...gambling companies do not employ lots of mathematicians, I am not sure why people think this...I am not even 100% sure why people think mathematicians are useful, most of the stats used are very basic. But retail providers don't, the prices you see for the biggest lines are provided by third parties, when you make a bet retail providers have no idea what price is being offered to you at that time. The only exception is parlays which are often priced in-house, these lines are very beatable but, again, retail providers limit because the purpose of the product is entertainment. Providers that do business with syndicates do not have lines on parlays because they are so beatable. The protection comes from all users being limited in the amount they can bet on parlays.
A side note is that even in financial markets which are completely open, market makers avoid informed flow. If there was no uninformed flow, there would be no market makers. There has to be an ecosystem. Retail providers exist to buy advertising to win retail users every weekend, to do that they have to run their business in a certain way. There can't be a situation where they just lose money non-stop to fund someone else's business.
> It's certainly bad for individuals, and by extension their families.
When gambler makes debt, then the partner gets half the debt in divorce. And they have to pay it.
It is not bad for families just "by extension". It is directly harming the family members even after the divorce.
Personal gambling debt is individual unless credited to a joint account no?
I live in a community property state, all of my accounts are owned by the marriage regardless of how they're titled. I would imagine legal debts are similar. There's some exceptions and I suppose gambling debt could be one, but I would expect the default to be that the debt holder could collect from assets held by either spouse.
This will vary greatly from one jurisdiction to another. It can also depend on the specific kind of marriage.
Yes, some marriages are "community of property", some are not. Even in community of property though some debts may be on the individual not the couple.
So one cannot really talk in generalities regarding this.
There's quite a lot of confusion about this question here.
You are right that debt of this type are individual and other parties (spouses, heirs) can't be pursued for it. But it has to be taken into account in a divorce.
Johnny and Janey have a $1m property, $200k savings, $200k retirement between them. They should each get $700k from a divorce (assume they were penniless students when they got together and acquired all the assets during the marriage).
If Janey* wants to stay in the house, she only has to borrow an extra $300k to buy Johnny out. That plus her share of the financial assets, pays for his share of the house.
Now Johnny reveals that he owes half a million in credit card debt that he never told Janey about. She can't just say "That's your problem, it comes out of your share." The marital assets are diminished by that amount before division.
Janey now gets $450k, an even split of the net assets. She has to come up with $550k to keep the house, effectively paying off half of Johnny's gambling debt as well as buying out the difference between the house and the financial assets.
If she doesn't try and keep the house, the cash she gets represents half of the assets minus half the debt. If Johnny owes $2 million, the married couple together are $600k negative. For her to leave the marriage, she has to pay half of this towards Johnny's debts. So she will have to come up with $300k cash to give him, on top of losing all her assets.
Of course, Janey married Johnny for better or worse, and that includes his gambling addiction. But it might feel unfair to Janet, especially if she didn't know about the gambling and couldn't have done anything to stop Johnny running up the debt. And Johnny's lawyer makes sure Johnny dredges up everything he owes in the negotiation, the opposite of the situation with assets where a sharp lawyer might tell Johnny to tread lightly owning up to his gold coins/offshore account. In the worst case Johnny hits Vegas when the divorce seems to be inevitable, knowing that the losses will go into the joint pool, whereas his winnings can be spent on partying or pocketed in cash.
* Divorce participants' behavior is stereotyped by gender. Apologies to all the thrifty houseproud Johnnys and louche deadbeat Janeys out there.
> She has to come up with $550k to keep the house, effectively paying off half of Johnny's gambling debt as well as buying out the difference between the house and the financial assets.
It is even worst - Jane has to pay half those debts even if she dont care about house. If assets minus debt go negative, which they do in case of gamblers, partner is in debt.
That is why the forst advice to partners of gamblers is to divorce asap. Because they easily end up paying for years.
Yes, good point, I am editing the answer just so that it's not misleading.
You don't have to go into debt for it to be a problem. If one spouse spends money gambling, it's still gone from the other one's savings.
In marriage, stuff you acquire during marriage is "common" no matter which accout you used. The same applies to debt. (Pre existing assets and debts are purely yours).
The common stuff then splits half half unless there was prenup or something.
The role of gambling in society has massively expanded in the past 25 years.
Legalization of sports betting, online poker, and meme cryptocurrencies are all highly visible examples of normalized gambling. Young people increasingly seem to believe that they need to gamble to get anywhere in life.
When traditional paths to financial security feel increasingly out of reach (housing, stable jobs, etc.), it's not surprising that high-risk/high-reward thinking becomes more normalized...
I've found myself getting less interested in sports at all because of how pervasive sports betting has gotten. The announcers are always talking about odds and shilling gambling company sponsors, which is annoying and makes me not want to watch the games.
It's become very toxic in baseball. just google "baseball player", "threats", and "gambling" and you'll see what I mean.
edit for examples:
* https://www.newsweek.com/sports/mlb/red-sox-pitcher-confront...
* https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/giants/article/mlb-threat...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tHiB8jLocbPLagYDZ/the-online...
This less wrong piece by a libertarian who examines the numbers and struggles to reconcile them with his beliefs is one of the best indictments on sports betting.
There is a small proportion of the population who cannot handle this. And they become prey to the predators in the sports betting industry. These guys make money off destroying their lives.
I'm happy to hear that. By my (short) experience working for this industry, some companies seem to forget they're a legitimate business now.
Honestly, it's starting to look more like social media 2.0... like built on engagement, dressed up as entertainment, and slowly warping how people relate to something that used to just be… fun
Interesting, Horse Racing and Football in UK doesn't seems to have that effect at all. I wonder why is it specifically US?
China just straight banned it. Not a terrible idea IMO
If you want to bet on your ball, do it at the counter like the rest of us degenerates. Something, something, water cooler chat.
Wow, took them a while.
If only this had been figured out before the gambling industry became too big to fail.
The USA is gambling it all away. Dangerous and dumb.
Sports betting once its in it's never leaving.
It has before
For anybody suffering from a gambling addiction, Gamblers Anonymous is a valuable resource.
https://gamblersanonymous.org/find-a-meeting/
Why is it any different than betting on the stock market? Buying a house is also a bet. Even if Americans view it as a bad thing, it should be allowed.
Stocks have positive expected returns: the risk premium. Sports bets have negative expected returns in aggregate and if you are good enough to only bet the ones you can spot with positive expected returns they ban you from the platform.
Stocks do not have positive expected return. The return on the average stock is 0% in the US which is negative after fees (this is a common misconception, market returns are positive only because large companies get larger and this is contextual, when this isn't true then even the market will lose money). This is to say nothing of 0DTE options.
There is a risk premium but this premium can be positive or negative. It has been negative in many countries, do you suggest they ban stocks?
I don't think stocks are the same thing as gambling btw. But it is significantly more complex in that they overlap, some financial products clearly exist in the US because gambling was illegal. A sports bet is clearly not an investment, but neither is a ODTE option. Both are entertainment, the former probably more logically so than the latter, I am not sure what appeal that latter can have other than to gambling addicts.
>they ban you from the platform
Use a respectable platform that doesn't do that then.
There's no such thing. The house always wins or the business collapses.
Yet, Polymarket exists where no one takes a cut* as it all happens on a blockchain.
*there are small gas fees for sending transactions on the blockchain
Are you familiar with any? I know people who bet on sports for a living and one of their biggest operational challenges is keeping accounts unbanned long enough to make consistent income.
Polymarket.
The odds are manipulated to give the gambling company the advantage. Big winners are identified and dropped. It is designed to drain money from gamblers.
Stocks are not that, in general. A particular fraudulent investment could be that. Crypto investment comes to mind.
I’m not sure what you mean by odds being manipulated. The bookmaker will generally adjust odds to where the money is being placed. Example, in American football if a team opens up as a 7 point favorite and betters put more money on the underdog than the favorite, the line gets smaller so more will take the favorite. Generally the opening line is what the book will think half the betters are willing to place on the favorite, and half on the underdog. Doesn’t always work out that way which is why you see lines move.
Also not sure what you mean by winners
Listen to season 4 of Michael Lewis' podcast. He covers the downsides in detail.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules
I think this is the ep that gets into the most detail, but I haven't read the transcript.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules/vegas-spor...
IIRC, if you're too professional or too lucky, the betting apps will restrict you and then lock you out. They only want the dumb money playing.
> Also not sure what you mean by winners
https://www.vegas-aces.com/articles/how-betting-sites-limit-...
Various forms of this have been practiced in traditional casinos for almost a century with increasing sophistication, it’s a well-established art by now.
You don’t need to even win to get banned (limited from making bets larger than a couple of dollars). You just need to make bets that look too smart and might result you winning in the future.
https://youtu.be/XZvXWVztJoY?t=667
Sports betting is just looking for chumps that have little to no chance of winning.
> Why is it any different than betting on the stock market?
We could honestly say gambling and investments were similar - if they typically had similar outcomes.
In late 1990s, I set up two customers (in retirement) with PCs and internet. One was a day trader and the other did online casinos. After a year they were both about as good as their contemporaries.
The day trader made more money than he lost but I don't know how much.
The gambler hid his habit from his wife. He lost their entire retirement savings, maxed out their credit cards, got more cards and maxed those out - and took out 2 mortgages on their formerly paid-for house. It ended their marriage.
These truly aren't similar outcomes.
Because the outcomes and demographics for sports betting vs the other two show different aggregate money movements and we make judgements about what we consider to be acceptably and unacceptably informed and consenting risk accepting behavior.
Certain forms of stock market operations are indeed banned from retail - for example "binary options" in the UK.
I think this is a good question, I’m sorry you’re being downvoted.
I think the difference is that buying/betting on a house or stocks are not a zero-sum game. It is feasible for everyone to buy a house, all the houses to increase in real-world value, and everyone benefit. Likewise with stocks. And on top of that effect, the bets being made are useful for society at large to make better plans, because they are a measure of society’s best predictions. Sports betting on the other hand, is truly zero-sum (although I think you could make an argument that it's actually worse than zero sum). Additionally, it is not useful for society to predict which team will win some set of games. This is just wasted effort on a curiosity. There’s nothing wrong with that effort as entertainment, but it is bad to incentivize our minds to take up sports betting, as opposed to say finance, engineering, art, or anything productive.
Options markets are zero sum.
Why? Both sides could use hedging, both sides could derive economic benefits, etc.
I happen to enjoy sports gambling and would be sad to see it disappear.
I'm writing this because I want you to know what you're depriving me of. Because _other_ people make poor decisions, we need to take that decision away from everyone.
I like gambling too, I was very much for legalizing it until it happened and I saw how many lives it's devastated, and how vulnerable young people are to it.
Now I don't give a fuck that banning it would deprive me (or you) of something we happen to enjoy.
Here‘s the article that started me toward changing my mind: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-online-sports-gambling-exp...
How would you feel if we just banned advertising it?
Im all for people like you having the right to make a choice, but the way its advertised rubs me the wrong way.
Kids are encouraged to watch the games which is a bit of a family event. Then during those games, ads are just everywhere for betting. Then theres a "18+ only" fine print.
We banned cigarette advertisements during sports and I would say we are better for it, but I wouldn't call to ban smoking.
Also it could do with some regulation banning people who win to much shouldn’t be allowed
This is just the same social contract you agree to in every part of your life.
Why can't you legally drive over 100 mph when you know you'd do it safely?
Why can't you own certain kinds of weapons when you know you don't want to kill anyone or yourself?
Gamblers going bankrupt is bad for all of us because they often have families and creditors who are harmed by the loss of the money, and the rest of us pay the price in the form of welfare, loss wages, etc.
The entire business model depends on most people losing, and those losses often come from people who can't afford it, the industry is structured to aggressively market, addict, and exploit psychological weaknesses, it's engineered dependence
> Because _other_ people make poor decisions, we need to take that decision away from everyone.
Sports betting is to entertainment what ultra-processed food is to nutrition, engineered to be addictive, marketed as "pleasure" and technically a personal choice, but built on exploiting human psychology
You can enjoy a burger or a bet responsibly, sure, but the problem is the systemic design, it's optimized for overconsumption and dependency, not well being, you end up creating problems whole society have to pay for it, it's systemic harm
What an incredibly selfish attitude.
I mean, yes, but it's so far down the list of bad things for society we're facing right now.
I'd rather we tackle the root problems leading to these. Increase education rather than reduce liberties.
I'm not, like, strongly opposed to reducing this particular liberty, but man it's not my first priority.
I don't think we have to take any liberties away to help reduce this issue - just banning gambling advertising would help a lot.
Isnt the root problem a company being able to A/B test the most addictive product? They spent huge amount of money to find all the psychological tricks, to identify who has gambling potential and then target those people.
Education wont beat that. Gambling is not a rational decision in the first place.
But, young men gambling (they are the primary target demographic) will make them into desperate and hopeless group. And not just financially, marrying or dating gambler is even bigger mistake then partnering with an alcoholic. Their lives will go down the drain in all aspects.
Where do you put drugs and alcohol on that list? Because gambling surely has an equivalent ability to wreck careers and families.
That's always an interesting thing. Where does autonomy end and the right of the government to intrude into your private life begin. The bottom line, that something is bad for you seems to be so logical. But when you think about it a bit longer you see that there are so many things that are bad for you that it would be next to impossible to regulate all of them. Ok, so you only do it for the things that are really harmful. But then you're still left with smoking, alcohol, obesity, the state's lottery and casinos (always legal, for some weird reason, but just as bad as other forms of gambling), parachute jumping, social media, free climbing and a whole raft of other items that have the potential to massively ruin your (or even someone else's) life. And then there are the things you could do but that are illegal, such as speeding and drinking and then getting into the driver's seat of a vehicle.
I find this one of the most difficult to answer questions about how you should run a society. In practice, we aim to curb the excesses and treat them as if they are illnesses but even that does not stop the damage. In the end it is an education problem. People are not taught to deal with a massive menu of options for addiction and oblivion, while at the same time their lives are structurally manipulated to select them for that addiction.
In the UK for instance, where sports betting is legal (and in some other EU countries as well) it is a real problem. But the parties that make money of it (and who prey mostly on the poor) are so wealthy and politically connected that even if the bulk of the people would be against it I doubt something could be done about it. If it were made illegal it would still continue, but underground. It's really just another tax on the poor.
Sports betting is problematic for the sports too. It causes people to throw matches for money and it exposes athletes to danger and claims of purposefully throwing matches when that might not be the case. This isn't a new thing ( https://apnews.com/article/sports-betting-scandals-1a59b8bee... ), it is essentially as old as the sports themselves.
> Where does autonomy end and the right of the government to intrude into your private life begin
I think there are really three questions bundled in there:
1. At what point is it not really free-will anymore, and more like your brain being hacked?
2. At what point can the government step in to rescue you from #1?
3. At what point can the government step in to defend others from what you do, voluntarily or otherwise?
Generally, I take a realist perspective on this. The line is wherever the people who wield power want it to be given their understanding of their self-interest. Any talk of "should" is a rhetorical exercise to convince people that it's in their self-interest to join you and oppose the thing.
I think there's a pretty strong "render unto Caesar" argument that any situation where money changes hands potentially involves the public interest.
Gambling used to be much more restricted in the UK, although horse race betting was always a thing.
Gambling companies have engineered sophisticated addiction machines that exploit the brain's weaknesses, so it's very different to most of the other things you listed. They also deliberately prey on the people most susceptible to getting addicted, and even engage in extremely predatory behaviour like giving high-risk targets all sorts of "free" perks and benefits in order to keep them gambling for as long and much as possible. I can't find it now, but a few months ago on HN was an article about one of these systems, where the gambler got a dedicated "advisor" that was giving them things like free rolls, free tokens to gamble with, free alcohol and even accomodations, all because they know the addicts will keep gambling and use their own money inevitably. They then ban people who are gambling too "smartly" or even just on lucky win streaks from participating in their "games".
Smoking is a great example and an almost 1:1 parallel to what's happening with gambling, they had teams of people and even paid off scientists to fabricate studies about the health benefits of smoking, and then used deceptive marketing that was very carefully crafted to ensure people tried it out, and the product itself is just inherently addictive. They ensured they can capture the next generation by specifically tailoring their adverts towards children and getting them curious to try tobacco.
As a result most of the world has banned tobacco advertising, and a lot of places are doing things like enforcing ugly generic packaging with extreme health issues plastered on the boxes, exorbitant prices & taxes on tobacco because of what Big Tobacco did.
Gambling should be treated the exact same as tobacco is and was. Advertising it should never be allowed in any context whatsoever, and the gambling spots and apps should have disclaimers all over the place indicating the dangers of it. Additionally, the actual companies should be heavily regulated to not be allowed to offer "perks" and to also not be allowed to pick who can play or not.
Gambling, like most things, is simply something that will always be a thing, so just like tobacco and alcohol it shouldn't be banned outright. That doesn't mean we need to let predatory practices proliferate. Nothing is stopping us from making gambling as unattractive as we reasonably can, both for the gamblers and the gambling companies. There will still be gambling, but just like tobacco there will be a lot less people doing it, and at that point the ones that are are at least as protected and informed as possible.
It's funny how first you say that 'it is very different' and then you proceed to show that it is in fact exactly the same.