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.
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.
> The games are hosted by very sophisticated companies, that have better mathematicians, and make money.
Oh, it's worse than that. In sports betting at least, if the gambler consistently makes money, the companies will ban or limit their gains. It's a scam.
> 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.
This is incorrect, specifically with regard to sports betting. Sports betting and poker are both winnable games. Most people don't win in the long run, but unlike in table games (Blackjack, etc.) there are absolutely winners that are not the house.
To be clear, that doesn't mean they're good or should be allowed. I used to be a poker player and enjoy putting some bets on football now, but I've come around to the general idea that sports betting in particular is a net negative for society. Still, if you're going to make an argument against it, it's always going to be a better argument if it isn't built on a basis that's just factually untrue.
Society's desire for regulation of behavior ebbs and flows.
Not limited to the US:
prostitution was legal and then it was not and now there is a laissez-faire of some kind in some places, in others there are brothels, in others you cannot, strictly speaking, but in practice it is whatever;
The consumption of alcohol was initially allowed, then forbidden, and later allowed again. Nowadays, some "thought leaders" are again somewhat pushing, if not for regulation, for public condemnation;
Abortion, same-sex sexual relationships, gambling, drugs, they all follow a similar pattern of regulation-liberalization-regulation- (random order), answering to "society" or some prominent voices within or the ever fleeting vibes of the times.
In other words, it does not make, strictly speaking, sense that certain behaviors are regulated or prohibited, and others are not.
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.
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.
I was already expecting a lot of gambling site ads, they took over the soccer tournament sponsorships almost completely anyway.
But what I found out when I came back in the last 3-4 years 100% shocked me. It wasn't just TV and soccer teams, I saw gambling ads in napkin holders at some restaurants, bus stops. I went to get a haircut and the barbershop had TV with gambling ads adorning their frames.
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.
If you look at the budget, it becomes obvious that the main activity of the federal government is taking money from one group of citizens so that another group of citizens, who are otherwise capable of working, can enjoy a life of leisure for the last 15-20 years of their life. Given that we’ve collectively decided that the bar for when we will massively impinge on people’s freedom is apparently to provide for other people’s idleness, I think it’s completely justified to also impinge on people’s freedom so that we can prevent problem gamblers from totally ruining their lives.
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.
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.
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.
I agree that it's 100% hope. And a little hope can be very bad. I once read an article about kidnapping, and the author stated that often kidnappers will reassure their victims that they will be let go, that everything will be all right, and that little bit of hope keeps the victim compliant.
the core issue is that such possibility does not exist. if you are successful gambler to the point where you are on the path to riches you will be banned from all platforms faster than Jets are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs
We already live in a country where owning capital generates more income than actually working. And this is rapidly getting worse. The GOP has sold the country on blaming minorities, and so things will get much, much worse before they can be better.
My understanding is that a big appeal of sports gambling is that it adds stakes to entertainment. So instead of casually watching the game you're much more invested. Given this angle, I don't think the majority of casual sports betters are thinking about this in terms of getting rich. It just makes their frequent content more engaging.
She thinks it's why things like cryptocurrencies/BTC have taken off: it's a chance to 'hit the jackpot', as many folks don't see another way to (financial) success.
I'd like to present a different perspective, abeit slightly radical.
I believe that there's a place for a time-efficient, minimal human approval, risk-reward system for a society in which jobs have been gatekept to ever-higher requirements and are even harder to sustain due to pressures of the people gatekeeping you out and around you once you've gotten in (ie. the bureaucracies of your co-workers and your boss's temper tantrums).
If you've ever talked to creative-passion professionals(ie. media-content, artists), clients don't really respect them and abuse their passion, plus the people around them put a lot of pressure on them. In addition, polishing their work takes up a lot of time. So it's highly probable that they would be stuck in this loop if they didn't do something.
You could say 'oh, they can upskill themselves' or whatever. However that carries significant risk and still binds the individual to people's approvals and their hidden/overboard requirements. All the while, time and mental health is being sapped from them. I knew a programmer in gamedev who pivoted to robotics. It was all math heavy stuff and consumed him and his mental health to the point of his relationships suffering.
Point is skills-pivoting is hard to execute, and gets riskier by the day (think ai and jobs). However, say there's a system that is easy to execute, but the rewards are variant. But if that individual is able to figure out a plan to generate positive expectancy, that's a great alternative to the system of 'get a job and another job and hope you tick the requirements'. It's like a business in which you fail until you don't.
Of course, the keyword is being able to turn whatever you're doing into *positive expectancy*. Like a business with a new offering/venture, everything new looks like a gamble because you don't know the information, the theories and the outcome. Do you want really want to kill off these new businesses?
I mean hard work has never made anyone wealthy, it usually makes someone else wealthy. What makes you wealthy is being good at negotiation and intepersonal skills, family connections, and luck. And, of course, a touch or genius—there’s a reason that some of the wealthiest people in tech are also sometimes the most brilliant. Somebody who figures out and properly leverages a labor saving technique, even if it seems obvious afterwards, will become wealthy in most circumstances; someone who had their finger on the pulse of a market, whether it is art, fashion, or the S&P 500, can become wealthy by making the right investments and sales. But hard work? Nobody ever became wealthy by working in a coal mine 12 hours a day, nobody ever became wealthy spending hours and hours meticulously and painstakingly setting up a script that could’ve been prompted out in under 5 minutes. Wealth is something that always involves a level of risk and chance, that’s why sports betting is so enticing, because it operates on the same principles as the rest of the market, even though, clearly, like in a casino, the house always gets its cut. But there are many people who live comfortably just playing poker 3 to 4 times a week, and their wealth is no accident.
Gambling encourages and creates bad behavior. I got to hang out at a local state-licensed casino for a few nights due to a work obligation.
Try it some time and people watch. At best, there's groups of people having a good time. Usually they seemed to be associated with music or convention activity. Mostly, it's depressing, with old people blowing their pensions on stupid slot machines. At worst, there's really obvious criminal activity with people washing money on table and poker games.
The only gambling thing that I ever thought could be good was the state lottery bonds they have in the UK and Ireland. Basically, it's like a CD for lottery... you the interest is a prize pot. But your principal is still there.
The online sports betting thing is gross. My son is 13, and many of the boys are totally enthralled with sports betting. We're creating addicts before they even earn money.
It's not just gambling. Influencer and VC culture incentivize this same 'hit it big or die trying' ethos. I have seen '5 million is too little to retire on' type of messaging on HN too. The only way to save more than that is to take on an irrational amount of risk (ie. Gamble).
For genZ, the squeeze comes from 3 sides. On one side, few professions promise long term stability. There is a feeling that the ground can vanish under your feet at any moment. (SWE jobs in particular are feeling this pressure). 2nd, Social media has raised the goalposts on the idea of a good life. Lastly, Nimbys and opaque healthcare policy have put the lowest (and most quantifiable) aspects of Maslow's pyramid out of reach. (Safety needs)
Gambling is a symptom. Nowdays, people don't invest in good bonds because there is no such thing. Similarly, people don't invest in steady jobs because increasingly, there is no such thing.
Housing reform, transparent healthcare and a small degree of worker protections would go a long way towards incentivizing stable decision making.
I think we have to caveat that we're all speculating here. I would assume there are studies of habitual gamblers, but since it was only nationally legalized a few years ago, there likely isn't a lot of recent research on regular people who weren't specifically seeking it out in the past.
But just to say, having been a sports fan my entire life, as well as growing up with a grandmother that lived in Vegas, I bet a tiny bit myself but knew quite a few who bet a lot more, and it wasn't really like you're saying. Nobody expected to get rich. Hitting it big enough to make a meaningful impact on lifetime wealth requires parlays that are statistically just as unlikely as the actual lottery, at which point you may as well simply play the lottery, which was already available.
Instead, sports bettors seemed to come in a few varieties. One is the analytically minded fans who just wanted to see if they could make some amount of predictable extra income. I fell into that category back in college and grad school and did consistently earn money, but a very small amount, in the four figures a year, less than you'd get working part-time at McDonald's. Another is the casual fan who just finds the games more entertaining if they have a personal stake. These are the kinds of people who participate in office super bowl pools and it's pretty innocuous.
The problems start to happen when people from either of these groups has some kind of unforeseen financial problem, no other way to get money quickly, and figures they'll try something like throwing a bunch of money into a boxing match they think they can predict. Not get rich levels, but something like betting enough to hit a 50 grand payoff. It becomes a problem because one of two things happens. You succeed, but then you can't acknowledge the role of sheer luck, think you're smarter than you really are and can predict the future, and you keep doing it. Otherwise, you lose, but can't let it go and chase your losses to try and recoup them. Either way, you end up losing. The only way to win is get very lucky and then have the discipline to immediately quit, which almost no one has.
But realistically, people have bet on sports as long as sports have existed, in every civilization we have a record of. It's hard to say it's reflective of any kind of specific social condition. It's a natural thing to do. Most bets are small and effectively just people throwing away money on a pointless purchase no more harmful than buying junk on Amazon they don't really need and will never use. It's becoming a problem because legalizing it gave the sports leagues and broadcasters themselves a financial incentive to market it. Every game and every analysis now includes ads and the pundits themselves giving their picks, making it appear to be an important part of being a fan than everyone should do. They took something that could have mostly been harmless and industrialized it. A whole lot of people who easily get addicted to anything addictive are now specifically getting addicted to this, simply because they can. It's problematic in exactly the same way alcohol sales are. The marketing industrial complex is making it seem like you're not a full human if you're not doing it, but if everyone is doing it, then the addicts are going to be doing it, too. At a small enough scale, it's still destroying a few lives, but it's like hoarding, rare and most people vaguely know it's out there somewhere but never think about it. If the most popular entertainers in the world, emblems of civic pride and identity, started running ads and on-air segments telling you that you should hoard and exactly how to do it, then we'd have a much larger scale problem.
The problem we have as a country, though, is the court logic legalizing it couldn't have realistically been different. There is no sane way to justify having it be legal in Nevada but nowhere else. It should be legal nowhere, but then yo...
Lotteries and crowdfunding medical bills are similar. Predatory exploitation of magical thinking as substitutes for addressing causes and conditions that lead to desperation, deprivation, and hopeless circumstances.
Cryptocurrencies also partially fit this category being semi-pyramid schemes, but have intrinsic advantages to hide criminal activity and for tax evasion in addition to their privacy-protecting properties for legitimate transactions.
I mean if we're going cut back on the worst offenses of sports gambling it seems like "you can only gamble on professional sports" could be a potential easy win.
The next step would probably be eliminating betting on individual players, you can still bet on weird stuff but it would have to be $team does $thing. It wouldn't work for solo sports but given the most popular sports are all team sports it would cover a lot.
It's awful when watching sports. I don't think I can get five minutes in an NFL game without seeing something about sports betting. It's in the commercials, sponsored segments, graphic placements, apps, etc. It's fucking gross.
This kind of stuff is repulsive to me. I'm sure it's similar elsewhere too, but my local radio stations in the Midwest have been running ads about not harassing athletes over sports betting. The whole thing is comical to me, since they are collecting massive amounts of tax revenue from the whole thing to begin with and paying for the ads with it.
They are great things coming from it, like school funding, but the whole concept doesn't really sit well with me.
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
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.
Good read, thanks! I was surprised that the author brushed by restrictions around marketing while concluding that limited access would be an improvement. The normalization of betting and odds via inclusion in broadcasts, celebrity endorsements, etc strikes me as a narrow precursor to harm that would be relatively easy to target and puts the onus and focus on the providers to find a sustainable business model.
What I find most sad about this is the symbiosis between the USA and the UK and how corporations (or politicians) in each one will look to see the most profitable (or divisive) in the other and copy it.
This is how the US ended up with rampant sports gambling/advertising, something the UK has had most of this century. It's also how we ended up with voter ID in the UK despite having near-zero problems with voter impersonation.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] threadLet'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.
Oh, it's worse than that. In sports betting at least, if the gambler consistently makes money, the companies will ban or limit their gains. It's a scam.
> $x is pumped into the system by the punters, $y is extracted, $z is returned. The 'house' is the only winner.
This is incorrect, specifically with regard to sports betting. Sports betting and poker are both winnable games. Most people don't win in the long run, but unlike in table games (Blackjack, etc.) there are absolutely winners that are not the house.
To be clear, that doesn't mean they're good or should be allowed. I used to be a poker player and enjoy putting some bets on football now, but I've come around to the general idea that sports betting in particular is a net negative for society. Still, if you're going to make an argument against it, it's always going to be a better argument if it isn't built on a basis that's just factually untrue.
Yes. Ban the phone apps and had the ads. Advertising works people, that’s why they pay for it!
Not limited to the US:
prostitution was legal and then it was not and now there is a laissez-faire of some kind in some places, in others there are brothels, in others you cannot, strictly speaking, but in practice it is whatever;
The consumption of alcohol was initially allowed, then forbidden, and later allowed again. Nowadays, some "thought leaders" are again somewhat pushing, if not for regulation, for public condemnation;
Abortion, same-sex sexual relationships, gambling, drugs, they all follow a similar pattern of regulation-liberalization-regulation- (random order), answering to "society" or some prominent voices within or the ever fleeting vibes of the times.
In other words, it does not make, strictly speaking, sense that certain behaviors are regulated or prohibited, and others are not.
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.
Banning gambling doesn’t mean hunting down gamblers, it means stopping them from being in the App Store listings and showings ads in TV.
If you want to find sketchy websites on your own after that - that’s your freedom.
Having 20 year old men bombarded with gambling media is not freedom.
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.
I was already expecting a lot of gambling site ads, they took over the soccer tournament sponsorships almost completely anyway.
But what I found out when I came back in the last 3-4 years 100% shocked me. It wasn't just TV and soccer teams, I saw gambling ads in napkin holders at some restaurants, bus stops. I went to get a haircut and the barbershop had TV with gambling ads adorning their frames.
Being able to gamble privately, 24/7, with all the psychological/engagement "optimizations" is even more insidious.
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.
https://gamblersanonymous.org/find-a-meeting/
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.
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.
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.
I think casinos do the same thing..
the core issue is that such possibility does not exist. if you are successful gambler to the point where you are on the path to riches you will be banned from all platforms faster than Jets are mathematically eliminated from the playoffs
Kyla Scanlon (?) coined the term "financial nihilism" to describe this feeling:
* https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism
She thinks it's why things like cryptocurrencies/BTC have taken off: it's a chance to 'hit the jackpot', as many folks don't see another way to (financial) success.
On the contrary all epicenters of gambling are extremely rich areas populated by people who have mastered such art.
The proximities of the stock exchanges of every country are basically the richest zip code in the country
I believe that there's a place for a time-efficient, minimal human approval, risk-reward system for a society in which jobs have been gatekept to ever-higher requirements and are even harder to sustain due to pressures of the people gatekeeping you out and around you once you've gotten in (ie. the bureaucracies of your co-workers and your boss's temper tantrums).
If you've ever talked to creative-passion professionals(ie. media-content, artists), clients don't really respect them and abuse their passion, plus the people around them put a lot of pressure on them. In addition, polishing their work takes up a lot of time. So it's highly probable that they would be stuck in this loop if they didn't do something.
You could say 'oh, they can upskill themselves' or whatever. However that carries significant risk and still binds the individual to people's approvals and their hidden/overboard requirements. All the while, time and mental health is being sapped from them. I knew a programmer in gamedev who pivoted to robotics. It was all math heavy stuff and consumed him and his mental health to the point of his relationships suffering.
Point is skills-pivoting is hard to execute, and gets riskier by the day (think ai and jobs). However, say there's a system that is easy to execute, but the rewards are variant. But if that individual is able to figure out a plan to generate positive expectancy, that's a great alternative to the system of 'get a job and another job and hope you tick the requirements'. It's like a business in which you fail until you don't.
Of course, the keyword is being able to turn whatever you're doing into *positive expectancy*. Like a business with a new offering/venture, everything new looks like a gamble because you don't know the information, the theories and the outcome. Do you want really want to kill off these new businesses?
Try it some time and people watch. At best, there's groups of people having a good time. Usually they seemed to be associated with music or convention activity. Mostly, it's depressing, with old people blowing their pensions on stupid slot machines. At worst, there's really obvious criminal activity with people washing money on table and poker games.
The only gambling thing that I ever thought could be good was the state lottery bonds they have in the UK and Ireland. Basically, it's like a CD for lottery... you the interest is a prize pot. But your principal is still there.
The online sports betting thing is gross. My son is 13, and many of the boys are totally enthralled with sports betting. We're creating addicts before they even earn money.
I think this passes the buck. It's not the addictive apps and ads, it's society! Don't regulate us!
For genZ, the squeeze comes from 3 sides. On one side, few professions promise long term stability. There is a feeling that the ground can vanish under your feet at any moment. (SWE jobs in particular are feeling this pressure). 2nd, Social media has raised the goalposts on the idea of a good life. Lastly, Nimbys and opaque healthcare policy have put the lowest (and most quantifiable) aspects of Maslow's pyramid out of reach. (Safety needs)
Gambling is a symptom. Nowdays, people don't invest in good bonds because there is no such thing. Similarly, people don't invest in steady jobs because increasingly, there is no such thing.
Housing reform, transparent healthcare and a small degree of worker protections would go a long way towards incentivizing stable decision making.
But just to say, having been a sports fan my entire life, as well as growing up with a grandmother that lived in Vegas, I bet a tiny bit myself but knew quite a few who bet a lot more, and it wasn't really like you're saying. Nobody expected to get rich. Hitting it big enough to make a meaningful impact on lifetime wealth requires parlays that are statistically just as unlikely as the actual lottery, at which point you may as well simply play the lottery, which was already available.
Instead, sports bettors seemed to come in a few varieties. One is the analytically minded fans who just wanted to see if they could make some amount of predictable extra income. I fell into that category back in college and grad school and did consistently earn money, but a very small amount, in the four figures a year, less than you'd get working part-time at McDonald's. Another is the casual fan who just finds the games more entertaining if they have a personal stake. These are the kinds of people who participate in office super bowl pools and it's pretty innocuous.
The problems start to happen when people from either of these groups has some kind of unforeseen financial problem, no other way to get money quickly, and figures they'll try something like throwing a bunch of money into a boxing match they think they can predict. Not get rich levels, but something like betting enough to hit a 50 grand payoff. It becomes a problem because one of two things happens. You succeed, but then you can't acknowledge the role of sheer luck, think you're smarter than you really are and can predict the future, and you keep doing it. Otherwise, you lose, but can't let it go and chase your losses to try and recoup them. Either way, you end up losing. The only way to win is get very lucky and then have the discipline to immediately quit, which almost no one has.
But realistically, people have bet on sports as long as sports have existed, in every civilization we have a record of. It's hard to say it's reflective of any kind of specific social condition. It's a natural thing to do. Most bets are small and effectively just people throwing away money on a pointless purchase no more harmful than buying junk on Amazon they don't really need and will never use. It's becoming a problem because legalizing it gave the sports leagues and broadcasters themselves a financial incentive to market it. Every game and every analysis now includes ads and the pundits themselves giving their picks, making it appear to be an important part of being a fan than everyone should do. They took something that could have mostly been harmless and industrialized it. A whole lot of people who easily get addicted to anything addictive are now specifically getting addicted to this, simply because they can. It's problematic in exactly the same way alcohol sales are. The marketing industrial complex is making it seem like you're not a full human if you're not doing it, but if everyone is doing it, then the addicts are going to be doing it, too. At a small enough scale, it's still destroying a few lives, but it's like hoarding, rare and most people vaguely know it's out there somewhere but never think about it. If the most popular entertainers in the world, emblems of civic pride and identity, started running ads and on-air segments telling you that you should hoard and exactly how to do it, then we'd have a much larger scale problem.
The problem we have as a country, though, is the court logic legalizing it couldn't have realistically been different. There is no sane way to justify having it be legal in Nevada but nowhere else. It should be legal nowhere, but then yo...
Pun intended.
Cryptocurrencies also partially fit this category being semi-pyramid schemes, but have intrinsic advantages to hide criminal activity and for tax evasion in addition to their privacy-protecting properties for legitimate transactions.
edit for examples:
* https://www.newsweek.com/sports/mlb/red-sox-pitcher-confront...
* https://www.sfchronicle.com/sports/giants/article/mlb-threat...
These young women don't have the money to hire security and are especially vulnerable as a result
The next step would probably be eliminating betting on individual players, you can still bet on weird stuff but it would have to be $team does $thing. It wouldn't work for solo sports but given the most popular sports are all team sports it would cover a lot.
They are great things coming from it, like school funding, but the whole concept doesn't really sit well with me.
https://casinocontrol.ohio.gov/home/news-and-events/all-news...
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.
This is how the US ended up with rampant sports gambling/advertising, something the UK has had most of this century. It's also how we ended up with voter ID in the UK despite having near-zero problems with voter impersonation.