That is one of the takes I've ever read. There is a reason gambling is so tightly regulated worldwide, and it's certainly not because governments hate easy vice tax revenue. Gambling debt destroys family units, increases poverty rates (most notably for the children of gambling addicts -- the consequences are not localised only to the person making the bad decisions), and increases violent crime rates. Gambling is massively detrimental to society. There can be arguments in allowing people to do things that are detrimental to society in the name of freedom, but it's not a great thing to pretend those detriments don't exist at all.
Do you know of any studies that can accurately show the correlation between gambling and societal costs? On the surface the link makes sense to me and seems like it should be right, though I'm not sure how we could have tested it in a controlled way to really know the link exists.
There are a bunch of studies out there [0][1] (two I found immediately) showing the risks around problem gambling, but like with most vices people who’ve already picked the pro side tend to react in the same predictable ways (myself included):
1) Dismissal: Feigning or having a profound misunderstanding of how statistics work by poking at the methodology like “N=200? That’s meaningless.”
2) Apathy: “So what if some people get addicted? We can’t babysit everyone.”
3) Rationalization: “Yeah but it helps Native American reservations, so...”
4) Downplaying: "Ok problem gambling is bad, but how prevalent is problem gambling really?"
There's also a version of rationalization where people project arguments from the war on drugs to illegal gambling, as though the enforcement of illegal gambling was somehow had costs greater than just letting anyone bet any amount of money from their phones.
That's anecdotal, I was curious if there were (well designed) studies that showed likely correlation between the two.
I have had family members addicted to drugs and/or alcohol and friends that have been addicted to gambling at various times. I've seen similar reactions anecdotally, but that isn't societal or scientific.
One study showed a significant increase in domestic violence after gamblers lost sports bets (based on the team for a specific city losing or winning and then comparing DV rates to cities before and after legal online sports betting).
In my country, lot of institutions running out-of-home-campaigns against gambling-addiction etc.; so yes, if public institutions are doing this then there is some evidence there
I don't doubt that the programs are helpful, but how does that equate to evidence?
Creating a campaign doesn't prove in anyway the specific problems caused by gambling, especially at the societal level. It only shows that there is a group willing to fund programs against gambling addictions.
In no way am I questioning the intent or value of such programs, I hope it doesn't read that way. It just isn't necessarily relevant with regards to evidence.
You would like a study proving a negative? Good luck.
My point absolutely wasn't that gambling has no known negative side effects. I was asking out of curiosity if there were studies someone could link to that actually tried to test it in a controlled way.
> Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society.
This isn't true.
each 10 per cent increase in gambling expenditure in NSW results in more than
4,500 additional assaults
2,800 additional home break-ins
1,300 additional break and enter (non-dwelling) offences
1,400 additional motor vehicle thefts
2,300 additional stealing from motor vehicle thefts
3,800 additional fraud offences each year
> Stock market integrity is important because of their function in the economy
Some might argue that people - including gambling addicts, and those impacted by their addiction - might possibly be more important than one of many possible financial mechanisms for free enterprise.
Is that NSW = New South Wales? I'm asking because Wikipedia lists New South Wales as a population of only 8.5 million, and those crime numbers are insanely huge relative to that.
The part the article OP linked to would be based off the line:
To put these percentage changes in terms of interest to policy makers, a 10% decrease in gambling expenditure in NSW would result in 4579 fewer ASS offences; 2867 fewer BESD offences; 1380 fewer BESND offences; 1398 fewer MVT offences; 2361 fewer SFMV offences; and 3793 fewer FRD offences 2 each year
Right, it's almost like necessity and desperation cause people to do desperate things. If I take your money and give you no resource in return, that's a degeneration.
You are ignoring the point of TFA. Kalshi & Polymarkets provide a marketplace to monetise political decision-making, a.k.a corruption. This is definitely detrimental to society.
First of all, anyone getting scammed is detrimental to society because society is made out of people and those are people getting scammed. Gambling addicts are not less important than wealthy people.
Second, these markets are generating new gambling addicts, which is wildly and provably detrimental to society.
Just so we're clear on the standards of solidarity here, someone murdering your entire family would be tragic but not detrimental to society. How much should society do to prevent that from happening?
> Scamming of gambling addicts is tragic but not detrimental to society.
I used to believe that. With the legalization of all the sports betting and how fast it can drain a gambler which can then affect the gambler's family, I'm now pretty much on the other side of the fence.
Just like we banned public smoking because of the effects of secondhand smoke, I'm pretty convinced that the secondary effects of gambling means it needs to go back to being banned. I don't see an obvious way to legislate gambling to prevent the auxiliary victims. It doesn't help that getting maximum profit as a bookie means being part of a group of the scummiest people on the planet who will stoop to anything to drain people of their money as fast as possible.
The sports betting sites even have account managers who are tasked with keeping people on the sites even after the user has decided to quit. It’s so lucrative they can afford to pay people to sit and text gambling addicts.
This is common practice in gambling and now games, too: Zynga has 'VIP' teams for high-spending free to play game customers, they would talk on the phone at length, get to know them, fly them to Vegas for jaunts, etc.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-does-zynga-hunt-for-whales...
> "We've done so much experimenting at Zynga with VIP. We know what's the frequency of contact. We know what call types work. We know what times to call. We know exactly who to call and when. We know who has a higher propensity to be more susceptible to our call."
Sports betting is particularly galling because the actual prediction is so unimportant. The only real reason to care whether Jontay Porter is credited with three or fewer rebounds in a basketball game is to win a bet about it.
You're encouraging people to waste their money just so that you can use the Wisdom of Crowds to predict something completely worthless.
Depends on how many of those gambling addicts there are.
If a huge enough portion of the population try to solve the statue quo of their economic problems by betting all on red, that's not gonna be great for society, including those who don't gamble.
Same as beer or any other drug - just a way to have some fun and not destructive provided you can control yourself.
Though, the one time I opened a CSGO gun case and felt the dopamine rush, it was way stronger than any drug I've done. Not that I'm a "highly-experienced individual", but alcohol, weed or adderall don't come close to a CSGO case. Gambling feels much riskier.
I can't think of any addiction worse than gambling. It can ruin the life of a family quickly whereas all other addictions are in general only self destructive.
Regulation and education are where the sane middle ground is. You don't outright ban the stuff (which is expensive and doesn't work anyway) but you keep the worst of the harms it causes from getting too out of control. Sadly, gambling is under-regulated and we'll probably all be suffering for a while as a result before regulations are tightened back up.
I agree that sane regulation is the most likely successful approach in the world we currently live in. A large cultural shift would be required for total prohibition to be successful.
Alcohol is the only painkiller which can be infinitely self-administered. There's value in that. It's quite ancient, been proven to work, which is why it's probably stuck around so long.
What are you talking about? Fatal alcohol poisoning hits long before infinite self-administration. And there actually are many other far safer painkillers than alcohol.
Gambling can absolutely destroy lives. I've seen it in my own family. Its highly addictive nature combined with an easy way to lose everything you own is incredibly dangerous.
I've personally witnessed domestic violence from a gambler taking heavy losses as they realize they're about to be in a really bad place financially. I've never seen someone get violent over messing up a few rows of knitting.
So your beef is with domestic violence, not with gambling.
In a counterfactual where someone was doing some gambling and not doing some domestic violence, would you be still upset about the gambling in and of itself? Who does it harm?
Its not just domestic violence (though the rates of DV are usually higher with gamblers than the general population...huh I wonder why), but also just completely messing up a family's finances. This can really destroy families and relationships.
And sure, the same could be done with lots of things. But gambling is incredibly addictive.
I've watched family members gamble themselves into homelessness before. Isn't this a harm as well? Aren't the kids harmed when they lose their home and have no college savings despite the household having a net value of several million dollars a few years before?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not 100% against all forms of gambling. I gamble from time to time myself. What I'm against is this current wave of constant, relentless push of gambling into damn near everything, all the time. Back when gambling meant you'd have to go to the riverboat or fly halfway across the country or you're only dealing with small stakes poker between friends, its radically different to apps on our phones pushing notifications all the time, every sports game spending a significant amount of screen real estate to showing betting odds, news outlets talking about polymarkets all the time.
Could one have still been a problem gambler back before smartphone betting? Sure, one of those family examples I know about related to flying out to Vegas a few times a long time ago. But the rates of that happening were far lower before.
Maybe I enjoy having an arsenal of late-model machine guns, doing research on rare nuclear isotopes, brewing cholera in my septic tank, tending a Japanese knotwood garden, raising lantern flies, and breeding new strains of cold viruses.
Perhaps society should continue to restrain such hobbies.
If a lot of people have that as their hobby, and some are careless or malicious, people will be harmed. Now suppose that it's not simple to stop the offenders directly. Instead, restricting the sale of nuclear isotopes or cholera samples would probably be highly effective.
What is the point of being this obtuse? Is there a rhetorical benefit to pretending that gambling is not a vice? That it is just a "hobby"? Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?
>How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?
Gambling? Is people questioning gambling a new thing? Seems like the opposite is the case. Again, this is where being purposefuly obtuse gets us.
> Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?
Yes, of course.
Selling drugs is also a private transaction between two people that does no harm to anyone else.
If the people buying or selling drugs are harmful to others in the rest of their life, that's on them. It shouldn't be used as a fig leaf to negatively impact people who can buy and sell drugs responsibly.
Have you watched sports recently? Gambling has always had a negative effect on the perceived fairness but once that effect becomes a core part of the way the sport is monetized it gets even worse for everyone involved. Watching playoff games last weekend either Draft Kings or Fan Duel showed an ad where a single person in a crowded bar is cheering wildly by themselves while looking at their parlay bet or whatever on their phone - this isolation of the communal experience alone is a definitely a negative effect but I could go on...
Gambling is frying the brains of a disturbing proportion of genZ and millennial men. It's destroying sports and infecting politics. It's quite detrimental to society.
Until people are making money and affecting the world. Let's say that you're someone close to Trump and you have betted a very large sum that Trump should take a certain action. Are you going to try to make him take that action even if at that point it turns out to be the worst decision for the country and the world?
