This entire post is starting from a very bad premise:
"The costs of addiction aren't worth a little extra tax revenue"
True! But, the benefit of legalized gambling has never been the tax revenue. The benefit is the gambling! Just like any other activity, people engage in it because they want to. If you ignore the benefit of gambling to the people who enjoy it (and most people enjoy it and do not have a gambling problem), then you're going to massively undercount the benefits, and indirectly overweight the costs.
People by and large should be able to gamble, but not because of tax revenue, or the frequency of problem gambling, but because Americans are adults who can and do decide for themselves how they want to live their lives. We let people drive cars on race tracks, drink coffee & alcohol, eat steaks, and many other things which can ruin their lives.
Your options for consumer behavior are incomplete. Consumers are also frequently irrational, in a Dunning-Kruger sense: they aren't ignorant about the odds, but they think they can beat the odds.
Milan, I have a couple small criticisms and I'm going to let em loose
> If one assumes that the lucky store effect wears off after a while (and mostly applies to the winning store itself) then it seems likely that some of this long-term increase in consumption reflects people starting to play the lottery during the initial shock and then getting hooked.
This is a very poor way to support any kind of claim about addictiveness. Compare the idea of people "getting hooked" with people just finding out that gambling is a hobby they enjoy. We have no way of telling how much of this effect is which, so whatever amount you think is the former depends entirely on how much you *already* thought gambling would make people addicted.
Also, I think your comparison to free trade could have been a bit clearer on a key point. The reason that free trade is good and gambling is bad is that free trade is *positive sum*, and so we can turn it into a pareto improvement with good redistribution. Meanwhile, gambling is *zero sum* (or you could even say negative sum considering the overhead costs of a casino), so legalizing it then redistributing is just extra stuff-shuffling for no benefit. You allude to this, and I imagine most readers understood you, but I still don't feel like the piece ever puts this key distinction clearly in its sights.
Thanks for the piece though, I haven't seen this issue covered much and I think gambling is a clear example of something socially harmful, and we should be thinking carefully about that when deciding to legalize it. I'll also just point out the whole controversy of loot boxes in video games, it's a close parallel discussion that you might find interesting if you don't already have an ear on it
Personally I think online gambling is a really bad idea with little benefits. Gambling in Las Vegas (or Native American casinos, or on cruises) is relatively tame. You typically need to travel to get there, so the people who attend are usually "rational" gamblers there for a good time. Online gambling promotes addiction, which is a problem. The benefits to online gambling cannot be used to promote an otherwise unlivable area (like Vegas), or underserved communities (like Native American tribes), which means their profits flow to individuals who are likely already rich.
Just my 2 cents.
I personally enjoy gambling, but I limit how much I gamble and I only do it on special occasions. I frequently got to Vegas for trade shows, so when I'm there I might risk a hundred dollars on a night of blackjack. But that's the extent of it.
The question boils down to access: An internet site that makes it easier to place more bets (and in the case of slots, play faster) creates bigger losers. You might be surprised, but one of the biggest opponents to Internet casinos was Sheldon Adelson (might have been a protectionist ploy, but he seemed truly aghast). Same with sports gambling: More access means more problems, especially if parlays/in-game wagers are featured.
With all of these “sins” there’s a spectrum of what to allow. I’d be good with banning ads for gambling sites. Casinos require more of an effort to go to, so I don’t think they’re as pernicious.
BTW: The lottery spend research seems to sidestep a basic question: Is it a good with a very high diminishing marginal utility? If everyone feels that after X lottery tickets they’ve had enough, they’ll spend roughly the same regardless of income. Another point: It’s not the higher expected value that lottery players are looking at, it’s the size of the jackpot which, as it’s the only prize that varies, comes out to the same thing (sort of: You need to take into account the number of other tickets purchased due to splitting the jackpot). Taken together, it’s likely that the spend across income demographics is driven by high jackpot events.
This had a good summation: Legalize, but don’t promote:
Really enjoyed this article. I think Milan points out the important tension these firms have when so much of their revenue comes from the most compulsive/excessive users.
Late comment on the substance. To me, the fact that gambling is additive is not reason enough to ban it, as many commenters have argued. What bothers me about casinos and other forms of “the house always wins” corporatized gambling is the predatory nature of it. Companies are incentivized to make it as addictive as possible and exploit human weakness (and innumeracy) to keep people hooked. I don’t see alcohol or marijuana in the same way. It’s more like payday lending (which I could also do without) or subprime loans or trick credit cards. When we consider things to be broadly bad for society, that’s when we start to feel they are immoral (to some degree) but I don’t think everything immoral/bad for society should be outlawed, especially when there is broad disagreement about how bad/immoral it is (see also: abortion). I’d rather let people choose on their own, assuming it’s reasonable to expect the average person to be able to make an informed decision about it. What I oppose is corporations taking advantage of the least informed/most psychologically susceptible people in a way that can drive them to ruin. See also, corporate healthcare and health insurance.
Oh, and another thing- there’s a difference between legalizing something and destigmatizing it. You can have one, the other, or both. Sports gambling seems to be doing both rapidly, which doesn’t seem ideal to me. Things like pornography are legal, but still relatively stigmatized- you don’t see ads for Hustler during the Super Bowl. You can make it legal to gamble on sports while keeping advertising for it illegal (see also, smoking). Also I could do without all the ads for crypto, again since they seemed to come from companies eager to make a buck off of ill-informed people. But this is a slippery area of argument I know.
Porn of course is much less stigmatized than it used to be—openly acknowledging that one watches pornography would at one time have been shocking, but today is definitely not.
I think Douthat had a good point that the existence of these predatory companies in certain geographical areas, while not ideal for society, makes the harm much easier to manage than when they're all in our pockets 24 hours a day.
Gambling does end up functioning as a (income regressive) tax on stupidity/impulsiveness. Progressives should recognize this, as they are more attuned to societal inequalities.
We likely won’t know the full effects for a while (either societally or on tax revenues) of widespread legalized gambling. Frankly, we’re also seeing that legalizing marijuana wasn’t the tax revenue panacea it was made out to be either.
You acknowledge your bias, and then ignore it anyways. If we should ban things that can be bad for people, then why should we have legal alcohol? Or weed? Or cigarettes, as probably the worst offender of the three? Because generally, we have decided that there needs to be a higher bar for a ban on something. I don't think sports gambling meets that bar. Slot machines? Sure, maybe. But if people want to bet on the Superbowl, let them. Some of them will be addicted, but so too are there alcoholics.
But there are tens of millions of people who watch who benefit by having a small number of people gamble. It’s not the most important thing in the world, and sure, I don’t care if gambling is only legal in Nevada or something, but a small benefit times a large number of people can have a good amount of utility.
1. As a sports fan myself, I question how much added enjoyment these lines add, but supposing that it's high, they aren't irreplaceable. Commentators for many sporting events pick teams they think will win before the game starts; we could provide that in lots of formats.
2. Also, for those of us who were satisfied with the pre-Murphy situation of sports betting legal in a few states but not nationwide, there's no added benefit to legalizing gambling nationwide—we aren't getting new betting lines or new information about the games.
3. If we're thinking about effects on sports fans, we have to consider the negative tradeoffs too. An NFL player was just suspended for a year for betting on games; you can bet (ha) that we're going to get more such cases, and possibly serious betting scandals. More prosaically, a lot of people report annoyance with the constant gambling ads and references in sports broadcasts, while habitual sports gamblers report they can no longer enjoy games they don't have a bet on.
I have said in the past that gaming has been bad for me personally. Spending $30,000 on one pay to win game. 10,000 on another over s period of 8 years. It did not me a marriage as i was no and am not married. But my average w2 was like 50k year when i was spending like that. I wish society would try to cut back on gambling. Its not good for us.
Would people really not accept that coin toss? I might be an outlier, but that seems like an extremely irrational level of risk aversion (barring worries about fairness and credit, of course)
Yes, gambling increases addiction and cause net negative societal costs not offset by tax revenue. Also, it should be legal, because each individual is only hurting themselves and those who choose to be in their lives by gambling, and so the government does not have a sufficient reason to justify banning it. Taking the current and recent bans as the default for comparison is a natural thing to do, but I don't think it's all that fundamentally defensible given how nonsensical so many of our policies are.
I mean, it hurts their family too, at a minimum, especially kids, who can't do anything about it. That's just a specific example of the feminist counterargument that families break harm-principle libertarianism.
There is a huge difference between lotteries / casino games (slots, blackjack, craps, roulette) compared to sports betting (including horses) and poker. In the former, the outcome is random based on chance so that while you can occasionally “get hot”, EVERYONE who plays long enough will ALWAYS lose. Like betting $1 on a coin toss and only winning $.99 if you are right. Play 1,000 times and you will are statistically guaranteed to lose money. BUT wagering on sports is actually a wager against the other bettors. The odds in a horse race are parimutuel meaning that they are set by the amount of money bet on each horse. The point spread in a football game is not based on the “expected” difference but on whatever number of points will incentivize bettors such that the amount bet on either team is the same. In poker, you’re playing against the other players seated at your table. YES, the house takes a 10% cut from the proceeds awarded the winner. So - unlike the financial markets - there is huge friction that must be overcome. And I agree that is is difficult to pick winners against the football spread. But it is not impossible and those who study the game, the players, the weather, and evaluate that against the point spread do have a better chance of winning than someone throwing darts. This is the difference between sports betting and, for example, roulette - where every player has the exact same chance to win and the payout is just a little less than the odds warrant.
The fundamental principle I turn to on this is that prohibition doesn't work. It delegitimizes the actual tools of law enforcement, and creates an opportunity for organized crime syndicates that may actually have more roots in, and sympathy from, local communities. Like, the kid who's collecting the bets for the local numbers racket, he's your cousin's friend. You're not going to snitch on him to those cops who feel like a foreign occupier.
I am all for figuring out ways to regulate gambling and direct help to folks who engage in it, in an unhealthy manner. But banning gambling won't end gambling, it'll just create a new front for the pathologies of the War on (some) Drugs.
So what do you make of the worse outcomes we see in Britain and other European countries with legal gambling, compared to the US without it? Isn’t that a data point that prohibition can sometimes work? If we see worse outcomes in the coming years of legal gambling in the US, will that be another data point suggesting prohibition can sometimes work?
Did they legalize it while placing information about treatment directly adjacent to wherever it was permitted?
Like, you could compare this to what happened with opiates in the US, where Purdue Pharma convinced doctors that their new product would not be addictive, and there was a burst of prescribing, creating an increased flow of problem opiate users, and no new funding to help people get off the stuff once addicted.
I think the War on Drugs is plainly ineffective. Basically _all_ of that stuff should be legal, but heavily regulated. It should be _cheaper_ for the addict to get their heroin in a clinic, under supervision, with counseling about how they're going to get on a path out of addiction, than to buy it from a street dealer who is evading the cops and whose supply has to subsidize a private army. And certainly after you take into account the savings for society from having less criminality, it has a lower net social cost to just _give_ the addict their fix in that context, rather than have them go steal or hurt people.
Legalized gambling doesn't necessarily mean Keno in every diner and scratchers at every corner store. I also have some reservations about how video poker and video slots have been designed to artificially inflate the number of near-misses you get, compared to what would happen with randomly-dealt or -spun physical objects. But I'm fine with having casinos as a fun thing that people can do if they want. Personally I have no interest in gambling, I think it's silly, but I also don't even smoke pot. OTOH, I have spent maybe a few hundred dollars on silly extras in games, over the last 10-15 years since that started being a thing. (Actually, thinking about it, I also spent _thousands_ of dollars on things like a satellite modem and data, in order to compete at the top tiers of the location-based game Ingress -- figuring out how to get online from places other people couldn't was a core area of competition. On the other hand, the network engineering skills I taught myself for that were the basis of my current job, so I probably am net positive on that investment.) Let people have their frivolities, and even vices, just make sure there are resources available to help the tiny minority who have trouble controlling them.
I am basically on board with this, though I'll note that keeping that tiny minority tiny needs to be a priority. Vices you can do on your phone are way more likely to become ubiquitous, and the constant search for ways to juice the action (micro-bets and whatnot) basically put a functional slot machine in everyone's pocket.
I think you may be under-rating how bad the legal status quo was 20 years ago. Money was really gambled in all kinds of seedy places, the profits went to organized crime, and guys who broke knuckles to collect really were a thing.
I'm not sure what the worse outcomes are in UK and Europe, but there's a lot to be said for at least having things be largely above board. It makes it a lot easier to identify where the problems are and potentially regulate them in a better way.
The outcomes for problem gamblers are probably worse under an illegal betting regime, but there are many, many more problem gamblers in Britain than there used to be. (Granted the “before” then isn’t “when gambling was illegal” but “when it could only be done in storefronts”--maybe banning app-based betting is where we should be headed.)
I don't have a super strong opinion on what should be done because I just think it's really complex.
But for what it's worth, if we're talking about banning or regulating online gambling we should also be discussing pay-to-win online games and apps, which can trigger the same sorts of problems (Troy Garrett has a comment about that and his personal experience elsewhere in these comments).
I kind of want to require all legal gambling that involves code that produces the rewards to be open-source, so independent reviewers can tell whether the system is actually replicating stuff like a random draw from a bag, a random roll of a die, etc (which is fine); versus juking the stats (which should be banned, for the same reason we don't let casinos use weighted dice, deal from decks where the dealers can recognize cards and manipulate outcomes, etc).
Right now, a video roulette wheel will land the ball right next to the specific number you picked _way_ more often than would happen by chance. Same for video poker giving you four out of five cards in a flush, or video roulette giving you _two_ out of the three symbols you need for a big score. The authorities in Vegas try to ensure that the _actual win rates_ are kept identical to physical analogues; but they don't seem to regulate _how_ you're allowed to lose. So the people that design them jack up the near-miss rate, because that helps keep the whales sitting at the table.
I suspect at least some loot-box games are thinking up ways to create this kind of near-miss feeling as well, to help keep people buying.
We actually had this problem already and dealt with it via RICO. Gambling has been illegal forever but the mob hasn’t been a serious problem at least since Gotti went to jail.
RICO didn't break the power of illegal sports betting though. If anything it went the other way around - profits dried up, which diminished the power of large crime syndicates. Sports betting still went on and lower level crime like assaults, etc.. still occur wherever that kind of betting still happens.
Like NEI said, RICO really hit some already-weakened organized crime groups hard, but organized crime evolved and lives on, as indicated by the still-growing drug problem.
This entire post is starting from a very bad premise:
"The costs of addiction aren't worth a little extra tax revenue"
True! But, the benefit of legalized gambling has never been the tax revenue. The benefit is the gambling! Just like any other activity, people engage in it because they want to. If you ignore the benefit of gambling to the people who enjoy it (and most people enjoy it and do not have a gambling problem), then you're going to massively undercount the benefits, and indirectly overweight the costs.
People by and large should be able to gamble, but not because of tax revenue, or the frequency of problem gambling, but because Americans are adults who can and do decide for themselves how they want to live their lives. We let people drive cars on race tracks, drink coffee & alcohol, eat steaks, and many other things which can ruin their lives.
Your options for consumer behavior are incomplete. Consumers are also frequently irrational, in a Dunning-Kruger sense: they aren't ignorant about the odds, but they think they can beat the odds.
Milan, I have a couple small criticisms and I'm going to let em loose
> If one assumes that the lucky store effect wears off after a while (and mostly applies to the winning store itself) then it seems likely that some of this long-term increase in consumption reflects people starting to play the lottery during the initial shock and then getting hooked.
This is a very poor way to support any kind of claim about addictiveness. Compare the idea of people "getting hooked" with people just finding out that gambling is a hobby they enjoy. We have no way of telling how much of this effect is which, so whatever amount you think is the former depends entirely on how much you *already* thought gambling would make people addicted.
Also, I think your comparison to free trade could have been a bit clearer on a key point. The reason that free trade is good and gambling is bad is that free trade is *positive sum*, and so we can turn it into a pareto improvement with good redistribution. Meanwhile, gambling is *zero sum* (or you could even say negative sum considering the overhead costs of a casino), so legalizing it then redistributing is just extra stuff-shuffling for no benefit. You allude to this, and I imagine most readers understood you, but I still don't feel like the piece ever puts this key distinction clearly in its sights.
Thanks for the piece though, I haven't seen this issue covered much and I think gambling is a clear example of something socially harmful, and we should be thinking carefully about that when deciding to legalize it. I'll also just point out the whole controversy of loot boxes in video games, it's a close parallel discussion that you might find interesting if you don't already have an ear on it
Personally I think online gambling is a really bad idea with little benefits. Gambling in Las Vegas (or Native American casinos, or on cruises) is relatively tame. You typically need to travel to get there, so the people who attend are usually "rational" gamblers there for a good time. Online gambling promotes addiction, which is a problem. The benefits to online gambling cannot be used to promote an otherwise unlivable area (like Vegas), or underserved communities (like Native American tribes), which means their profits flow to individuals who are likely already rich.
Just my 2 cents.
I personally enjoy gambling, but I limit how much I gamble and I only do it on special occasions. I frequently got to Vegas for trade shows, so when I'm there I might risk a hundred dollars on a night of blackjack. But that's the extent of it.
For those without paywall access, here’s the WSJ article referenced (from 2013):
http://stoppredatorygambling.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2013-How-Often-Do-Gamblers-Really-Win-New-data-provide-some-answers.pdf
The question boils down to access: An internet site that makes it easier to place more bets (and in the case of slots, play faster) creates bigger losers. You might be surprised, but one of the biggest opponents to Internet casinos was Sheldon Adelson (might have been a protectionist ploy, but he seemed truly aghast). Same with sports gambling: More access means more problems, especially if parlays/in-game wagers are featured.
With all of these “sins” there’s a spectrum of what to allow. I’d be good with banning ads for gambling sites. Casinos require more of an effort to go to, so I don’t think they’re as pernicious.
BTW: The lottery spend research seems to sidestep a basic question: Is it a good with a very high diminishing marginal utility? If everyone feels that after X lottery tickets they’ve had enough, they’ll spend roughly the same regardless of income. Another point: It’s not the higher expected value that lottery players are looking at, it’s the size of the jackpot which, as it’s the only prize that varies, comes out to the same thing (sort of: You need to take into account the number of other tickets purchased due to splitting the jackpot). Taken together, it’s likely that the spend across income demographics is driven by high jackpot events.
This had a good summation: Legalize, but don’t promote:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n16/david-runciman/a-pound-here-a-pound-there
Really enjoyed this article. I think Milan points out the important tension these firms have when so much of their revenue comes from the most compulsive/excessive users.
Late comment on the substance. To me, the fact that gambling is additive is not reason enough to ban it, as many commenters have argued. What bothers me about casinos and other forms of “the house always wins” corporatized gambling is the predatory nature of it. Companies are incentivized to make it as addictive as possible and exploit human weakness (and innumeracy) to keep people hooked. I don’t see alcohol or marijuana in the same way. It’s more like payday lending (which I could also do without) or subprime loans or trick credit cards. When we consider things to be broadly bad for society, that’s when we start to feel they are immoral (to some degree) but I don’t think everything immoral/bad for society should be outlawed, especially when there is broad disagreement about how bad/immoral it is (see also: abortion). I’d rather let people choose on their own, assuming it’s reasonable to expect the average person to be able to make an informed decision about it. What I oppose is corporations taking advantage of the least informed/most psychologically susceptible people in a way that can drive them to ruin. See also, corporate healthcare and health insurance.
Oh, and another thing- there’s a difference between legalizing something and destigmatizing it. You can have one, the other, or both. Sports gambling seems to be doing both rapidly, which doesn’t seem ideal to me. Things like pornography are legal, but still relatively stigmatized- you don’t see ads for Hustler during the Super Bowl. You can make it legal to gamble on sports while keeping advertising for it illegal (see also, smoking). Also I could do without all the ads for crypto, again since they seemed to come from companies eager to make a buck off of ill-informed people. But this is a slippery area of argument I know.
Porn of course is much less stigmatized than it used to be—openly acknowledging that one watches pornography would at one time have been shocking, but today is definitely not.
Absolutely, though it can probably be argued that shift hasn’t been a net positive for society
I think Douthat had a good point that the existence of these predatory companies in certain geographical areas, while not ideal for society, makes the harm much easier to manage than when they're all in our pockets 24 hours a day.
Gambling does end up functioning as a (income regressive) tax on stupidity/impulsiveness. Progressives should recognize this, as they are more attuned to societal inequalities.
We likely won’t know the full effects for a while (either societally or on tax revenues) of widespread legalized gambling. Frankly, we’re also seeing that legalizing marijuana wasn’t the tax revenue panacea it was made out to be either.
You acknowledge your bias, and then ignore it anyways. If we should ban things that can be bad for people, then why should we have legal alcohol? Or weed? Or cigarettes, as probably the worst offender of the three? Because generally, we have decided that there needs to be a higher bar for a ban on something. I don't think sports gambling meets that bar. Slot machines? Sure, maybe. But if people want to bet on the Superbowl, let them. Some of them will be addicted, but so too are there alcoholics.
I’m surprised that you didn’t mention the positive externalities sports gambling causes of knowing with much more accuracy who is going to win a game.
I don’t gamble, but I watch sports, and enjoy knowing what the line is.
If that’s anywhere on the list of top ten reasons sports gambling should be legal then it absolutely should be banned.
But there are tens of millions of people who watch who benefit by having a small number of people gamble. It’s not the most important thing in the world, and sure, I don’t care if gambling is only legal in Nevada or something, but a small benefit times a large number of people can have a good amount of utility.
My thoughts on this are:
1. As a sports fan myself, I question how much added enjoyment these lines add, but supposing that it's high, they aren't irreplaceable. Commentators for many sporting events pick teams they think will win before the game starts; we could provide that in lots of formats.
2. Also, for those of us who were satisfied with the pre-Murphy situation of sports betting legal in a few states but not nationwide, there's no added benefit to legalizing gambling nationwide—we aren't getting new betting lines or new information about the games.
3. If we're thinking about effects on sports fans, we have to consider the negative tradeoffs too. An NFL player was just suspended for a year for betting on games; you can bet (ha) that we're going to get more such cases, and possibly serious betting scandals. More prosaically, a lot of people report annoyance with the constant gambling ads and references in sports broadcasts, while habitual sports gamblers report they can no longer enjoy games they don't have a bet on.
I have said in the past that gaming has been bad for me personally. Spending $30,000 on one pay to win game. 10,000 on another over s period of 8 years. It did not me a marriage as i was no and am not married. But my average w2 was like 50k year when i was spending like that. I wish society would try to cut back on gambling. Its not good for us.
Would people really not accept that coin toss? I might be an outlier, but that seems like an extremely irrational level of risk aversion (barring worries about fairness and credit, of course)
Yes, gambling increases addiction and cause net negative societal costs not offset by tax revenue. Also, it should be legal, because each individual is only hurting themselves and those who choose to be in their lives by gambling, and so the government does not have a sufficient reason to justify banning it. Taking the current and recent bans as the default for comparison is a natural thing to do, but I don't think it's all that fundamentally defensible given how nonsensical so many of our policies are.
I mean, it hurts their family too, at a minimum, especially kids, who can't do anything about it. That's just a specific example of the feminist counterargument that families break harm-principle libertarianism.
There is a huge difference between lotteries / casino games (slots, blackjack, craps, roulette) compared to sports betting (including horses) and poker. In the former, the outcome is random based on chance so that while you can occasionally “get hot”, EVERYONE who plays long enough will ALWAYS lose. Like betting $1 on a coin toss and only winning $.99 if you are right. Play 1,000 times and you will are statistically guaranteed to lose money. BUT wagering on sports is actually a wager against the other bettors. The odds in a horse race are parimutuel meaning that they are set by the amount of money bet on each horse. The point spread in a football game is not based on the “expected” difference but on whatever number of points will incentivize bettors such that the amount bet on either team is the same. In poker, you’re playing against the other players seated at your table. YES, the house takes a 10% cut from the proceeds awarded the winner. So - unlike the financial markets - there is huge friction that must be overcome. And I agree that is is difficult to pick winners against the football spread. But it is not impossible and those who study the game, the players, the weather, and evaluate that against the point spread do have a better chance of winning than someone throwing darts. This is the difference between sports betting and, for example, roulette - where every player has the exact same chance to win and the payout is just a little less than the odds warrant.
The fundamental principle I turn to on this is that prohibition doesn't work. It delegitimizes the actual tools of law enforcement, and creates an opportunity for organized crime syndicates that may actually have more roots in, and sympathy from, local communities. Like, the kid who's collecting the bets for the local numbers racket, he's your cousin's friend. You're not going to snitch on him to those cops who feel like a foreign occupier.
I am all for figuring out ways to regulate gambling and direct help to folks who engage in it, in an unhealthy manner. But banning gambling won't end gambling, it'll just create a new front for the pathologies of the War on (some) Drugs.
So what do you make of the worse outcomes we see in Britain and other European countries with legal gambling, compared to the US without it? Isn’t that a data point that prohibition can sometimes work? If we see worse outcomes in the coming years of legal gambling in the US, will that be another data point suggesting prohibition can sometimes work?
Did they legalize it while placing information about treatment directly adjacent to wherever it was permitted?
Like, you could compare this to what happened with opiates in the US, where Purdue Pharma convinced doctors that their new product would not be addictive, and there was a burst of prescribing, creating an increased flow of problem opiate users, and no new funding to help people get off the stuff once addicted.
I think the War on Drugs is plainly ineffective. Basically _all_ of that stuff should be legal, but heavily regulated. It should be _cheaper_ for the addict to get their heroin in a clinic, under supervision, with counseling about how they're going to get on a path out of addiction, than to buy it from a street dealer who is evading the cops and whose supply has to subsidize a private army. And certainly after you take into account the savings for society from having less criminality, it has a lower net social cost to just _give_ the addict their fix in that context, rather than have them go steal or hurt people.
Legalized gambling doesn't necessarily mean Keno in every diner and scratchers at every corner store. I also have some reservations about how video poker and video slots have been designed to artificially inflate the number of near-misses you get, compared to what would happen with randomly-dealt or -spun physical objects. But I'm fine with having casinos as a fun thing that people can do if they want. Personally I have no interest in gambling, I think it's silly, but I also don't even smoke pot. OTOH, I have spent maybe a few hundred dollars on silly extras in games, over the last 10-15 years since that started being a thing. (Actually, thinking about it, I also spent _thousands_ of dollars on things like a satellite modem and data, in order to compete at the top tiers of the location-based game Ingress -- figuring out how to get online from places other people couldn't was a core area of competition. On the other hand, the network engineering skills I taught myself for that were the basis of my current job, so I probably am net positive on that investment.) Let people have their frivolities, and even vices, just make sure there are resources available to help the tiny minority who have trouble controlling them.
I am basically on board with this, though I'll note that keeping that tiny minority tiny needs to be a priority. Vices you can do on your phone are way more likely to become ubiquitous, and the constant search for ways to juice the action (micro-bets and whatnot) basically put a functional slot machine in everyone's pocket.
I think you may be under-rating how bad the legal status quo was 20 years ago. Money was really gambled in all kinds of seedy places, the profits went to organized crime, and guys who broke knuckles to collect really were a thing.
I'm not sure what the worse outcomes are in UK and Europe, but there's a lot to be said for at least having things be largely above board. It makes it a lot easier to identify where the problems are and potentially regulate them in a better way.
The outcomes for problem gamblers are probably worse under an illegal betting regime, but there are many, many more problem gamblers in Britain than there used to be. (Granted the “before” then isn’t “when gambling was illegal” but “when it could only be done in storefronts”--maybe banning app-based betting is where we should be headed.)
I don't have a super strong opinion on what should be done because I just think it's really complex.
But for what it's worth, if we're talking about banning or regulating online gambling we should also be discussing pay-to-win online games and apps, which can trigger the same sorts of problems (Troy Garrett has a comment about that and his personal experience elsewhere in these comments).
I kind of want to require all legal gambling that involves code that produces the rewards to be open-source, so independent reviewers can tell whether the system is actually replicating stuff like a random draw from a bag, a random roll of a die, etc (which is fine); versus juking the stats (which should be banned, for the same reason we don't let casinos use weighted dice, deal from decks where the dealers can recognize cards and manipulate outcomes, etc).
Right now, a video roulette wheel will land the ball right next to the specific number you picked _way_ more often than would happen by chance. Same for video poker giving you four out of five cards in a flush, or video roulette giving you _two_ out of the three symbols you need for a big score. The authorities in Vegas try to ensure that the _actual win rates_ are kept identical to physical analogues; but they don't seem to regulate _how_ you're allowed to lose. So the people that design them jack up the near-miss rate, because that helps keep the whales sitting at the table.
I suspect at least some loot-box games are thinking up ways to create this kind of near-miss feeling as well, to help keep people buying.
Yes, as a parent I'm very much in favor of restricting or even banning lootbox mechanisms.
what do you do about the mob? if gambling is banned surely you'll have problems with gangsters making money off it.
We actually had this problem already and dealt with it via RICO. Gambling has been illegal forever but the mob hasn’t been a serious problem at least since Gotti went to jail.
RICO didn't break the power of illegal sports betting though. If anything it went the other way around - profits dried up, which diminished the power of large crime syndicates. Sports betting still went on and lower level crime like assaults, etc.. still occur wherever that kind of betting still happens.
Like NEI said, RICO really hit some already-weakened organized crime groups hard, but organized crime evolved and lives on, as indicated by the still-growing drug problem.
fair enough. why do we still have the same problems with drugs then?