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.
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.
This cryptocurrency craze already happened in other places like South Korea where cryptocurrency user base is bigger and more active than the stock market, might be a glimpse at the future in the USA with SK's plummeting birth rate.
I think it’s rational in the same sense as insurance. Insurance is a small cost to cover the costs of a potential event that you can’t afford. Lotteries are a small cost for a potential event that you can’t afford not to benefit from.
The key is that in a well-functioning society and wisely-lived life, you don’t need to spend the cost on lottery because you can afford life/retirement without it’s winnings.
I’m genuinely curious to what extent the hardships younger people face economically are related to wasting huge amounts of time on screens. The average Gen Z person spends nine hours per day on screens. The average 18-24 year old American spends more than three hours per day just on social media.
I recognize all the various societal and structural factors that disadvantage younger people. At the same time, people have agency. When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same.
It is, of course, not entirely fair to criticize younger people given that there are teams of psychologists working to make these products as addictive as possible. So perhaps we older people need to do something about it. Yes, I sound old AF: “kids, get off your phones and do something useful!” Yes, I say this to my own kids, with little discernible efficacy. But I honestly wonder what you all think of this. Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?
Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them.
The “screen” effect doesn’t exist. But the percentage of students enrolled in cs programs grew a lot of the last few years, and I’ve seen the passion difference have an effect. Two friends of mine graduated last year. Both had zero offers out of undergrad (this is the norm right now, again, completely irrelevant to screen time). One of them was passionate about coding and kept working on side projects/leetcoding, eventually landing a role at a tech company after a year of working at a boba shop. The other, who struggled with coding and was verbally not passionate about it (complained about it a lot, didn’t interview prep much) ended up throwing in the towel a few months on the job hunt.
An anecdote, but probably generalizable across those in today’s job market. But the market is the core problem, second to the individual’s willingness to grind. Neither are related to screen time.
The hard job market drives more screen time. Less jobs, less money to spend at bars or any other third place that has become paid, less money to network. You aren't spending time honing your craft now, you spend times on hustles trying to launch your social media account or by doing gig work on deliveries and rides hating.
You spend more energy than ever making less money than ever and probably under more stress than ever over all the looming costs. That's not a state of mind where you just sit down at the end of the day and start working on your side project. Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate.
>"Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate."
Although I'm roughly half the age of the median HN user, and don't have a lot of life experience, one thing I've learned over the last few years - particularly during covid - is that people will accomplish success after a difficult circumstance, and will come out one of two ways (which often decides their core values, political leaning, empathy towards people in other difficult situations, etc.):
1. "I got through it, so anyone else can, too"; or
2. "I got through it, and believe no one else should need to".
One can also progress from 1. to 2. after living long enough, and realising how much luck has played into their fate.
It took me 10 years of career to realise how lucky I had been, even though I had put work and effort, in no way that alone accounts for my whole professional trajectory. A lot of it was due to sheer luck, by knowing the right people, at the right time, being in the right economical environment of a specific geographical place. Yes, you can work on things under your control to improve your chances with luck but it's still not something in anyone's entire control.
Believing purely in 1. is being blind to this aspect of life in general, a lot of achievements only happened due to luck, there are other thousands of people who were not as lucky and over time it completely changed their paths in life.
It could be having to accept working at a boba shop for a year during labor market fluctuations. It could even be having to choose a different career altogether if the demand in that market simply no longer exists.
It could also be losing one's home because their kid got sick and they had a job that didn't offer PTO. Or a mom not being able to breastfeed because their government doesn't offer paid parental leave.
> Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them.
This times a thousand. I wouldn't have the jobs I do today if I didn't spend probably on balance an unhealthy amount of time in front of my own screens in the 90's. I got into programming because I loved screens and wanted to make them show me different things.
The difference today is two-fold IMO:
* The job market, as stated, is shit, especially for tech right now. For decades kiddos have been propagandized into going into a future in comp science of varying depths and qualities, both here in the US, and overseas. We have more tech workers than ever, wages are falling because of over-supply, and too many are focused on niche framework technologies who's skills don't translate well across the wide breadth of what's actually used in industry. Example: my company is hiring right now and it's DIRE to try and find mobile developers who actually develop in Kotlin/Java/Swift/Objective-C. I'm drowning in resumes for React developers but we don't use any of that and have no desire to.
* The screens now used by would-be budding hackers are locked down to hell and back, and were put in their hands when they were likely still shitting in their pants (no judgement of course, we all did it for awhile) and they don't conceive of them as "machines I could play with" but instead, simply as a never ending font of distraction and entertainment, perfectly curated to their individual desires.
I took the ancestor comment to be more about the "3-4 hours a day on social media" than time on a screen doing something like learning/improving programming skills.
Now, if you're spending three hours a day writing your blog and promoting your reputation as a skilled developer that's possibly going to help you. If you spend it surfing TikTok that's almost certainly going to do nothing for you. Though back in my 20s I could waste hours just watching stupid shit on TV.
It's possibly harder now to get a great job offer right out of school, but getting a lot of rejections as a new graduate isn't new either. It used to be a thing for seniors near graduation to paper their living room or hallway with all their rejection letters.
Most people are average. They will end up with average jobs and earning average money. One negative thing about social media is that it makes the top overachievers seem normal, and when you compare their lives (at least as they portray them) to your own it can make you feel hopeless.
We both lived through an era where there was a sense of community, even online, I would also spend boatloads of time learning how to program in my youth some 20+ years ago but that was around the same IRC channels, the same forums, with people who were in those spaces for years.
I would bond with them through this shared hobby, make acquaintances, even friends, people who you could recognise even if it was just a nickname.
My first real software development job was through friends I met on IRC and forums, they knew me for years, and offered me an internship after we had worked on a hobby project for a Ultima Online game server.
Fast-forward to now, it is really hard for young people to find shared spaces with a sense of community, in the real world or online. Everything they experience online is through mass platforms where everyone is basically anonymous even though it became much more common to share your real name. How can you bond with someone in the comments section of a YouTube video about your hobby? Or in the comments of some TikTok/Instagram post that was quite interesting? You simply can't, that post or video will disappear from others' feeds, there's no sense of permanence of the members of a community.
I think the closest to this experience might be some Discord servers, it's one of the ways I found to try to meet people on my current hobbies but the experience is still very different than the tight-knitted groups of IRC channels from the past. Forums, for the most part, were eaten by reddit, for some hobbies there are still quite a few active ones but the discoverability is much worse, you will have to jump through some hoops (usually starting on a subreddit) to find one of those.
My feeling is just that community in general is in decline, I'm lucky to have managed to keep finding these bubbles and sticking with them, online or in the real world, but when I talk to my colleagues in the 20-24 age bracket I sense they simply don't have communities. They have a few friends who they might meet for a shared activity but they generally don't know a place where they can go and meet other similarly-minded folks.
The screens end up as a bad refuge to try to find these connections that were much more natural when we were young.
> Everything they experience online is through mass platforms where everyone is basically anonymous even though it became much more common to share your real name.
And sadly even this diminished engagement you are talking about is somewhat optimistic in that it assumes the people they are interacting with on mass platforms are even real people, which is increasingly not the case.
> Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?
A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B
so the nihilism is real and warranted, if they don't inherit at least a downpayment for a house from you while you are still alive, the jobs available - even for highly pedigreed people - don't provide the income for the downpayment, for the most part. they would need arbitrage with high paying work in a very low cost of living place, for a long time, or the same but coupled with a socioeconomic equal who also doesn't want any gaps in their high income employment.
many new-money parents want their children to prove... something... related to income and autonomy, which puts inheritance while living into "entitled handout" territory, instead of practical. while due to lifespan, any inheritance will only reach the child when the child is 60+ years old, where its impact to the utility and direction of their life is nullified, and it's just bean counting for the mere concept of "keeping money in the family" but doesn't give anyone a leg up in social status, partner selection, even where you own children's children go to school.
(note: if you actually are not confident in your retirement income and end of life care costs, then you are not parent this applies to. for parents sitting on big wins in real estate and other capital, it does.)
but the financial reality doesn't really support this slower moving culture. the share of people in the US that are both homeowners and married by age 30 has fallen to nearly single digits percents. Aside from marriage being less attractive too, many delay everything related due to being preoccupied with meager work and financial instability.
now that being said, the thing you are more familiar with, hustle, does still work. pumping earnings into an investment property somewhere less expensive does still work, only suboptimal because they would still need to be paying rent in the higher cost of living area. what's different is that burnout is just not valued any more. hustle culture itself is not valued, its nothing to brag about and a silent path one might pursue. while experiences are valued. entire generations of people watched gen-x and boomers delay gratification and saw their bodies fail by the time they reached the finish line. its seen as a cautionary tale, not discipline.
so yes, lots of people overcorrect into a defeatist attitude, but the incentives support it. normal jobs won't get them anywhere, high paying jobs also won't get them anywhere, the training for high paying jobs doesn't guarantee a high paying job either.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I guess one theory, then, of excessive screen time is nihilistic too: if you can’t get ahead, why not spend your time absorbed in an alternate reality, perhaps including alternate realities where you can get ahead, like GTA.
That said, what I see in young people around me (because of my age, there’s quite a few) is a lot of addiction, not nihilism. These are kids with opportunities based on their socioeconomic status and yet many are just wasting huge amounts of time. The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold? And what happens to society when a generation is sucked into what they themselves literally refer to as “brain rot”?
>The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold?
Sure. But that bar is sky high now because it's very easy to ignore you otherwise. If you're not already running a successful company, releasing some viral piece of media, or publishing some novel research, you're going to be ignored. Having a 4.0 GPA with multiple interesting side projects and even an internship isn't necessarily getting you a job out of college anymore. Or at least, for now. Things you need to do to be noticed basically mean you already have means to somewhat sustain yourself.
> if you can’t get ahead, why not spend your time absorbed in an alternate reality, perhaps including alternate realities where you can get ahead, like GTA ... That said, what I see in young people around me (because of my age, there’s quite a few) is a lot of addiction, not nihilism.
I think we both conclude that its not a conscious choice, screens are addictive.
I also think many people levying this scrutiny are just as addicted.
I took a community college class a few years back and for the first few sessions I was fidgeting, until I course corrected because I knew that was abnormal for me from the last time I was in formal education. My ability to course correct made me think about how younger generations may be at a disadvantage because they don't know any other way to operate.
> The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold? And what happens to society when a generation is sucked into what they themselves literally refer to as “brain rot”?
I think it holds, income and work look different to many people. A steady high paying job is still optimal for a broad population, but being influential on social media or making a roblox game, all of which is built in the ecosystem they spend time on, seems practical too.
> When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same.
So... you spent a lot of time in front of a screen, huh?
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 agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers.
A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under 30 have looked at the trends over their lifetime and determined that their lives are going to have so much volatility they need a massive amount of money to weather the storm.
Yeah, after doing the numbers, 5M makes sense for my generation. But of course it depends on what "financially successful" means. This isn't defined in this piece, so I defined it as "can myself for a career, save for retirement, and pay off any emergencies". My current yearly expenditures are $60k or so, so if I give a 50% buffer for taxes, savings, and emergencies funds, then take that over a career of 40 years... 3.6m dollars.
And to be fair, my expenditures are very small compared to most others. No loans, no major medical issues, single person living alone. Having a family easily triples this number and we get right on that 10m figure.
The incomes are still wonky, though. I don't know how financial success is double, but income demands are tripled.
Ah, so they are just basing their life decisions on falsehoods then? lol
I know the world is different now, but I graduated high school in the wake of the 08 financial crisis. A lot of this Zoomer doomerism sounds like what people said about millennials.
But I (and my future wife) just went to a state school with in-state tuition. Got tech/eng degrees with some debt (5 figures). Have worked in the industry with ups and downs (including layoffs) for a decade or so now. Paid that debt off. Lived in a high CoL city in a nice apartment. Got a nice house after 5y of saving (but not being super frugal, just savvy I'd say. e.g. drove the same 08 Civic the whole time). And now we have a baby and only one of us works at all (and the other WFHs).
We didn't get giant donations from our parents (although some reasonable college savings helped, which I am repeating for my kid). Didn't go to prestigious fancy schools. Didn't even exceptionally excel in school.
But the key was to not throw our hands up and say the system is fucked. It's waxed and waned since that 08 crisis, and not participating is the main way to have lost. So yeah, thinking insanely wrong stuff like you need 10 mil to succeed is just stupid and self sabotaging haha.
The 10MM figure might be a falsehood, but I think that you're falling for the same thing previous generations have fallen for: Assume that because it worked out for you, it will work out the same for the current generation.
I'm not sure that it's an accurate view of reality this time. And to be clear I'm older than you, so this isn't me being a doomer and throwing my hands in the air about my own future. This is me noticing that if I myself can't afford a house in my city, how is the younger generation supposed to do it? They simply can't, not after only 5yrs of savings at least. Not even if they cut down on avocado toasts.
Leading up to me buying my home, the narrative was about how expensive houses are - especially in my city (Seattle).
But now on the other side, I got so lucky to buy one when I did (2020) due to interest rates.
Savvy also comes into play. The most affordable decent Seattle houses then were like $750k for sub-2k sqft well outside the main parts of the city. But Tacoma had 3k sqft houses for under $600k. 45ish minute reverse commute to Seattle bustling-est neighborhoods for evening fun. When we discovered this we pulled the trigger and it was the best financial decision we ever made along with going to college.
I agree it's a shame that owning in the biggest city (especially the nice parts) is hugely expensive.
> 45ish minute reverse commute to Seattle bustling-est neighborhoods for evening fun
What is a "reverse commute"? Is that just going into the city at the opposite time of day from normal work?
Also, 45 minutes one day (1.5hr total) is a rather large chunk of the evening to spend in transit for "evening fun."
> I got so lucky to buy one when I did (2020) due to interest rates.
It's funny, I remember thinking that people buying in 2020 were nuts because none of us knew what the economy was going to do, and it turns out that those who did buy came out ahead. I cite this among friends as one of the many ways in which I feel like being cautious with money has been the wrong choice (e.g. maintain 6mo-12mo emergency fund, don't make large purchases in periods of uncertainty, etc).
I don't know. If you're definition of success is owning a home and having a family, it gets close.
you need to clear 1-2m for that house by itself in any mid-high COL area right now.You need another 1-2m in 18 years to take care of your kids (they can live on less, but is that "successful"?). In 20 years we're already talking about 3-4m dollars before we even dive into the other bills and emergencies to address.
We have to remember that "financially successful" isn't some precise term. Some may treat "able to eat food and keep a roof over head" as successful, where others may see "can raise a healthy family" as so.
Was that survey over total earnings or savings? Like yeah..a few million tucked away will allow me to not work again. Or I can just work for a few decades like a normal person lol.
But precisely because "financially successful" isn't a precise term, the concept can be and is manipulated by smooth operators. It's always possible to construct a plausible argument that true success lies just beyond what you could reasonably expect to make through your own efforts (and therefore you might as well throw your money at me for a chance to achieve it). I don't think we can separate Gen Z's incredibly high standards for financial success from the amount that they're marinading in ads for gambling, crypto, and scam investments.
Any anecdote will suffer from survivorship bias (and also negative anecdotes). The data on the other hand are very clear that people are not doing as well as their parents. Unless you have a theory as to why Americans simply became more lazy, etc. a starting point should sensibly be a systemic explanation.
Also, just speaking about your anecdote, let me add my own. I am also doing fine. Not particularly rich but middle class, good income, and savings for retirement. But I just got hit with compounding dental issues, which despite having the most expensive health insurance from my company that's well known for providing excellent employee benefits, it will end up costing me at least 20k out of pocket, potentially going up to 30-40k due to the need for multiple surgical procedures.
And fortunately we can manage it, but if the same issue had happened to me 5 years ago, I would basically be at the edge of my savings where even a minor unexpected cost would have put me in terrible shape, and 10 years ago I may have had to declare bankruptcy, or more likely, do without either suffering in pain, or pushing off the problem to be handled by even more expensive work a few years down the line, taking on expensive debt, or setting myself up for periodontal disease which leads to a whole host of issues including significantly increased risk of dementia.
Even if one is earning and saving decently, the precariousness of life in the US of A today is incredible.
Yes, I am not seeing any problem with the $10M figure, assuming one wants to insure against old age health expenses, insure against loss of income between age 50 and 70, and be able to to travel here and there between the age of 60 and 80.
For a current 20 to 30 year old, they should expect SS benefits to come at a higher age, probably 72 or even 75, and whatever benefit amount they get will buy less than what it buys today. And they will have to shell out for better quality healthcare (i.e. a couple decades ago, they might have seen a doctor, but today, they see an NP/PA, and in a few more decades, they might not even get that).
The big expense is insuring against loss of income between age 50 and whatever age government benefits start. Most people will never make their way up the income ladder again, so they need to make sure they have adequate savings by then, otherwise they are cooked, and those are the ages that healthcare expenses start adding up.
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.
One of my biggest complaints with Steam is that it's basically an unlicensed casino with extra steps -- and one of the things you could do at one point was buy a "challenge pass" for a major tournament that was effectively a "pick 'em"-style bet on the outcome. There is no age gating on this, outside of a click-through prompt since the game is rated ESRB M/17+ and its equivalents.
1. You buy an event pass
2. The event pass contains a "coin" that can be upgraded, and grants access to a "pick 'em" interface
3. Based on the outcomes of the matches and your picks, the coin is upgraded
4. The upgraded coin allows access to "souvenir packages"
5. The "souvenir packages" and their contents (rare and/or unique weapon skins) can be traded on Steam's marketplace for store credit or currency
My son has mentioned friends whose fathers let them place bets. “Hey, who do you like for the wildcard game tonight, I’ll put a tenner ($10) on it for you.” It’s not seen the same way as a parent giving giving their kid alcohol or other age-gated things like that.
Interestingly, considering the role that sports have in day to day social discourse & self-identity with teams (“we” need to win this game), I’ve heard a few acquaintances say basically “placing a bet makes watching it more interesting, it’s too boring otherwise”. And given the social/identity thing you can’t not watch it. “Hey you catch that play last night? ‘We’ fell apart, awful…” gotta be able to keep up with the tribe chants.
When I was 13 my parents would let me have a (small) glass of wine with dinner.
I'm sure many parents place proxy sports bets for their kids. Maybe to teach them how to use betting as a form of entertainment and learning how your money can also just disappear. I can see it being a good thing if done carefully. I can also see it going wrong.
> I can see it being a good thing if done carefully.
My experience with raising three kids is there’s a limit to the amount of messaging that gets through with any fidelity. So, the only financial teaching I did with them, was the stocks, bonds, diversification, risk and prudence schtick. I could see the attempted teachable lesson about gambling losses going sideways and crowding-out the rest.
I was pretty much the same way with my kids, with one more detail: Teaching a reasonable level of skepticism about advertising, marketing, and peer pressure in general.
You could do that, but it seems kind of obvious and condescending? Cause right now you can forbid it and theyll see all their friends lose money and never win anything until your child is of legal age. For everyone else, it seems like some kind of inherited cultural addiction that gets culturally passed down. Just openly mock gambling as evil/a scam/rigged and they'll probably be more likely to pick that up if you back with principals instead of taking the weak, confusing, and contradicting stance of feeding $50 into the evil system.
I think the point is saying something is "evil" is very unlikely to discourage young people from anything and even more likely to make it sound exciting and edgy.
It's like Oscar Wilde's famous quote: "As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular."
My parents did something similar for me, and I still remember the lesson a few decades later.
I think the details matter here. If you give your child $10 every month to make one bet, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose; you are doing it wrong. If you give them $50 and let them make a series of bets not exceeding $10, they will learn that the curve sometimes goes up, sometimes goes down, but ultimately ends up at zero. Not because "you were not lucky today, but maybe the next time", but because this is how the system works.
I was so disappointed my first and only time visiting a casino. I thought it'd be full of show girls, rich people, James Bond types in tuxes...you know, the way they are often portrayed in movies.
Nope. 99% slovenly dressed elderly banging lifelessly away at slots. The other 1% lonely, middle aged men.
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".
I dislike the author's framing of this in terms of right-wing meme culture, but almost all of the analysis is nevertheless correct. An orthodox Marxist could make essentially the same argument using different terminology - except about the inevitability of the trend continuing forever.
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.
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
In sports betting contexts, you're often just betting against other players, I believe. If they're anything like prediction markets, the exchange isn't going to care how successful you are, as long as you're betting.
They're not like prediction markets. They do exactly what GP says they do: if you win, you effectively get banned (max bet sizes shrunk toward $0). If you suck, they do the reverse and expand your max bet sizes and offer you loans.
These things are so unfathomably antisocial that I earnestly believe every single politician who advances them should be (journalistically) investigated as extensively as is legally possible.
There are lots of places where you can bet against other players now. The older betting markets like Betfair are no longer available in the US, but Kalshi, Polymarket, and others now offer the same kind of two-sided marketplace in the US.
Not only do winning players get quickly banned like sibling said, the house take on the major platforms is vastly higher than with traditional sports betting.
>the house take on the major platforms is vastly higher than with traditional sports betting
What kind of markets is this referring to?
Polymarket still charges 0 fees. While Kalshi's fees+spread can approach or even exceed traditional sportsbooks on some markets, neither of them have any interest in banning winning players, as they don't take a side on any bet and directly benefit from more betting activity. Kalshi also pays interest on bets, which can add up on longer term positions.
Betfair has operated with a similar model for decades in the UK and elsewhere.
I was referring to platforms like DraftKings, which are extremely sleazy. I think Polymarket and similar low/no fee markets on the other hand are awesome.
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.
When Denmark liberalized gambling small "casinos" with slot machines and sports betting started to pop up everywhere. Those wouldn't be an issue if it was regular people popping Friday afternoon to get a coffee and spend $10 - $20 on the slot machines and perhaps put down a few bucks on this weekends big game, but you're right, it no.
The addicts and lonely line up waiting for these places to open, they spend everything they've got and the gambling places encourage it by providing them with free coffee, snacks and in some cases dinner.
No, gambling isn't immoral, but praying on the addicts, the mentally challenge and the lonely is. If you can't stay in business without exploiting the weak, you have no right to exist. The only negative consequence I see from banning gambling is the potential dangers of a black market.
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.
Moreover, one simply needs to look at which games casinos select to see how not only does the house always win, but it chooses to win more and entertain less --- Faro was once a popular game, and by all accounts is a great deal of fun to play, but a Faro table does not make as much money for the house as Blackjack and other games, so one doesn't see them in casinos these days.
In the Abrahamic tradition, seeking benefit by avoiding labor is sinful. I don’t think it needs to be widespread to serve as an example. One data point that widespread gambling was eroding norms was that professional gamblers could not give testimony.
OK, so what is to be done when access to labor is gatekept? If you can't have a job, or can't benefit from a job beyond "give a man a fish, he eats for a day", are you not meant to look for an opportunity to generate income outside of working?
If you’re a bookie, and an adherent of these Iron Age religions, then you might be instructed to Render upon Caesar. If being a bookie means feeding your family, you can relax so long as you realize that your responsibility is to slightly nudge the right players to win.
Okay, so 30 million people, or more conservatively 16 million people. Same question, and before you say anything, don't be condescending.
ETA: Maybe most conservatively, let's use only the % uniquely included in U-6 and excluded in standard, or 14.4 million people. I'll claim these 14m people are the "gatekept from full employment" in that they don't qualify as narrowly unemployed unless you include "all people marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons"(1)
Same question. 14m people who are being excluded from labor, are they not free to attempt to generate income via means other than labor, lest they suffer the judgement of Abraham?
In other words, is Abraham hiring? If not, are the people he refuses to employ meant to accept serfdom to preserve their soul?
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
> which is an extremely misleading move on your part
No, I was pointing out the hypocrisy with the Catholic view.
You are adding to what I pointing out about the wiki and Christianity generally not having a problem with gambling itself: "The Catholic Church holds the position that there is no moral impediment to gambling" -- again no moral issue with gambling itself. Your source to back up your argument is simply not what you made it out to be.
I think it’s fair to say that the Catholic opinion is very much against the type of widespread gambling that is prevalent today, especially in the sense of it having negative social effects.
I don’t think that is hypocritical, more just nuanced. Church bingos aren’t putting people into poverty.
Your critique of my initial comment seems to be hinging on the single phrase of gambling itself. I just meant the commonly used sense of the word, today, which IMO implies the aspects that the Catholics label as negative. (I.e. most people don’t call bingo a gambling activity.)
But sure, Catholicism has a nuanced view and it’s inaccurate to say they are against gambling in itself.
The post of your I replied to with the source says
> 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.
Yes, that was how it reads to me, that gambling itself is frowned on; based on the post that reply was for where they stated "I would say gambling in itself isnt immoral." and that the problem is addiction and money. And I also agree with that. But gambling is gambling and while no part of it is immoral to me (I hold higher standards for that word), there are major issues with it due to greed.
Which is what your souce is saying Christians have a problem with, not it being widespread or happening at all -- simply the trying to get rich, the addiction to money -- thats the sin. Not gambling, gambling is fine; it's when it turn into a money issue, then there is a problem. And that can happen at your local bingo parlour or Macau, or Vegas or the back-room of a gas station or your buddy's poker game. The Christian bible/church have an issue when greed happens, not gambling (widespread or not).
I think this distinction is not actually useful in real life, where 99% of the money problems are from certain types of gambling and not from others. When people discuss gambling, they aren’t talking about bingo games and school raffles, they’re talking about the thing most people mean by the word gambling.
If the root problem is greed how is making that distinction not useful in real life?
What does the type of gambling matter? If we focus on the core issues: greed and money problems -- over trying to "protect" [my emphasis] others from the bad gambling -- we end up helping them with adjacent greed/money problems. Labeling outside things as the problem is the problem. Help the people learn to master the inner compulsion towards these things (and other skills to help pull themselves out of dire situations); the rest is just trying to find an enemy to blame because helping others in a real way is hard.
Though this is conflating correlation for causation. As you note yourself in GP, dire social conditions is what makes people see gambling (or risk-taking more generally) as one of the only viable options to get out.
Yeah but those are separate claims. "Lead causes health problem, and vicious cycles are a thing, therefore health problems cause lead!" is not a valid shape for an argument. It may well be true, but both directions have to be established before calling it a vicious cycle.
In this case, I can agree bad social conditions cause gambling, but I don't think the data supports the opposite, at least not more than many other things we take for granted, such as
Cause-and-effect relationships can be complicated and it is important not to jump to conclusions, but do you deny that there are millions of Americans who can correctly identify an addiction when they see it in someone they have some sort of ongoing relationshp with (either because they have training and experience in treating addiction or because they themselves or someone close to them were once addicted)?
Do you deny that those observers can correctly identify the substance or the activity that the addict is addicted to?
Do you deny that addiction is quite deleterious both to the addict and to the people with whom the addict is in some kind of relationship?
Many news stories claim that many Americans (young men particularly) are getting addicted to online sports betting. Do you dispute the accuracy of those news stories?
If so, can you guess as to the motivation for publishing these inaccurate news stories? Often a campaign to mislead the public is done because some group would gain something quite valuable if the campaign is successful. What would any group have to gain (aside from a slightly healthier country) from a successful campaign to make online sports betting illegal?
I do not dispute any of that. Many young Americans also get addicted to alcohol. Many young Americans self-harm over unrealistic ideals brought to them by the beauty/fashion industries. Many young Americans get depressed over social media.
We need to help these people, but we do not help them by driving their vices underground.
The gambling industry has funneled a ton of cash into academic researchers producing papers that gave credence to the idea of "addictive personality," which in turn was massaged by PR experts into the notion that some people are just born addicts, and the gambling industry can't help it if they become addicted to gambling too. "Addictive personality" itself is on very shaky grounds statistically, and the derived PR messaging certainly is false. The gambling industry is likely more culpable in this mess than even a typical, generally well-informed person might be aware.
"Addictive personality", now there is a deprecated phrase!
In drug rehabilitation, the phrase is no longer used. Instead people have a bingo card of disease, conditions and syndromes to go with addiction. Once people have been pigeon-holed in a dozen ways then the die is cast, these conditions are no longer imaginary, you have to hold yourself up in life because X, Y and Z prohibit you from even giving it a go.
Regarding the article, I detest organised gambling, however, relatively few chronic gamblers end up homeless and destitute. You need a good dose of class A drugs and a smorgasbord of childhood trauma to guarantee the truly negative outcomes.
I don't object to gambling amongst friends, even if it is on a card game. I might bet someone that they can't beat me on Scrabble, but I would be getting the dopamine hits from laying some massive, high-scoring words on the board to devastate my fellow players, but winning that £10 just ups the stakes and my competitive drive. If I am just betting on a sport (or even a Scrabble game) played by others, then it isn't quite the same.
What does amaze me about modern day gambling is that you know it is rigged. I don't trust an app to honestly flip a coin for me. My version of the app would be 'if heads show tails and vice-versa most of the time'. Yet people pour their life savings and some more into apps that are black boxes with no way of peeking inside to see how it works. The seasoned gambler must know that every game is rigged and that the house always wins, but they still queue up for another spin.
> relatively few chronic gamblers end up homeless and destitute.
They rank up unpayable debts and their married partners end up being legally obligated to pay half of that even after divorce.
Getting life together after gambling is super hard to impossible. It is literally easier to get back on track as alcoholic, as those have much smaller debts.
And it is easier to avoid keep alcohol out of house then ... cell phone put of house.
I have wondered for a while what happens to the gamblers in the city where I live. They don't end up in homeless shelters or at the soup kitchen, which has got me curious. I appreciate that the money comes to an end and debts are a result of that. However, the gamblers are not pushing it to destitution, they might lose all their big ticket stuff but they don't end up in just the clothes they wear and nothing else.
I don't think generalisations about ease of giving up alcohol versus ease of giving up sports betting (or other gambling) is an apples to apples comparison.
The chicken farmer necessarily seeks out the chickens that lay the most eggs, because that's how he makes his living. In an economy that incentivizes the highest profit-margins, this exploitation becomes intrinsic to the operation of a gambling establishment sans regulations that prevent it.
Games of chance and friendly wagers amongst friends may not, in themselves be immoral or harmful but gambling as an organized business activity is absolutely harmful
Gambling (without very strict rules) has a net negative outcome. You're not doing anything valuable, nor neutral, by gambling. So it could well be viewed as immoral.
Gambling is addictive because it gives you a dopamine rush. That’s why people gamble because it’s actually enjoyable.
I personally don’t see the argument for categorising it as immoral on the basis that’s it’s not useful. The same could be said about plenty of other enjoyable things.
However exploitation is clearly immoral. That’s where I have issue with gambling. Gambling operators don’t get rich thanks to the average users but because addicts give them much more than they should. That’s clearly immoral be it from a casino, a gambling website, or micro transactions in mobile game. Every companies which profit from that should be held accountable including Apple and Google which are clearly complicit.
That would allow us to better regulate it, treat addicts as they should, and end the networks currently profiteering from the flourishing black market and their exploitation of the addicts.
Prohibition just doesn’t work. We have tried dozen of times with various addictive substance from alcohol to tobacco. It’s nearly always a terrible solution.
It was more to provide an alternative to the parent's remark that it isn't. I fully agree that its exploitation is by far the greater evil.
I do not concur on the dopamine argument. There's no solid evidence for it. The underlying mechanism is probably much more complex. But since we're not discussing a signal path to addiction, it's an unnecessary complication of the argument that instills the belief that there's a medical cure.
Most Americans regard as immoral any substance or activity to which ordinary people become addicted at a significant rate.
Addiction breaks social ties. For example, when an addict starts to struggle to continue to pay for his addiction, he often starts to steal from friends and family members.
The average view on this on HN is quite different from the American average. Personality psychologists have observed that people who do well in software development and entrepreneurship tend to be high in a trait called "openness to experience". Maybe HNers are more tolerant of addictive substances and activities than the American average
because addictive substances and activities tend to be interesting experiences.
(I am restricting my universe of discourse here to the US only because it is the country I know best.)
> Maybe HNers are more tolerant of addictive substances and activities than the American average because addictive substances and activities tend to be interesting experiences.
I think the more accurate lens would be that Hacker News likes money.
On the surface at least, it seems like running a gambling or sports betting company would be a dream job. You get to systemically rip off your customers through your house edge, you retain the right to back off skilled players that can bypass your house edge, your expenses go to infrastructure as opposed to creating anything of value, and you get to externalize the wider societal consequences by blaming nebulous mental illness.
"This guy wants to pay me for the privilege of gradually losing money to me, why should I stop him?"
I think this is hard to argue against because you haven't defined what you mean by strict rules, but here are some positive outcomes of gambling:
- Insurance prevents financial catastrophe by aggregating risk, yet it is nothing more than wagering you'll get into trouble.
- Market liquidity is provided by people willing to bet on price developments, which smoothes out fluctuations in availability.
- Large infrastructure projects and charity donations been financed through lotteries -- it's a way to raise money without a guarantee of return.
- If you want to sell something which a single buyer cannot afford, and it is difficult to share, it can be sold through a lottery which lets buyers buy a ticket's expected value rather than the full cost of the thing.
These benefits still exist when unregulated, but of course it seems to work even better under the appropriate regulation.
What I mean by strict rules is (but not limited to): no profit for the organizer, loss limit for everyone across all bets, etc. But I don't know what set of rules would qualify to make gambling neutral.
- Infrastructure is better off paid by taxation. That's much fairer, and more predictable.
- I don't see insurance as gambling. It has a chance element, but that's not enough to qualify something as gambling. You buy security against large losses at a moderate price (*), instead of building up large losses for nothing. It's also a step which you hope doesn't pay out (sickness, fire, theft).
Extortion is more fair than voluntary contributions? Maybe on arguments from regression but it's not obvious.
> You buy security against large losses at a moderate price
Flood insurance is literally saying "I bet my house is going to be underwater" and winning the big cash price if it is.
Sure, you made an offsetting gamble when buying the house, but I don't see how you can claim a gamble is no longer a gamble when a partially offsetting gamble exists -- that's just two gambles, and indeed prudent risk management when it comes to big gambling.
Then move to North Korea where there are no taxes.
> Flood insurance is literally saying "I bet my house is going to be underwater" and winning the big cash price if it is.
yeah the big prize of all your personal belongings being destroyed, being semi-homeless for an indefinite period of time, fighting insurance companies to get the full value of your home and all assets (glhf finding out what's secretly not covered or you can't prove you owned), searching for a new home in an inflated market, lost productivity, dead pets, etc.. What a prize! This is something you'd expect a 12 year old to try to argue.
Insurance is not legally classified as gambling for very obvious and practical reasons.
You’ve ruled out not just all gambling but all business. The examples the parent comment above you gave are all profit generating for the organizer.
Insurance in particular seems to be a clear societal win and is in fact gambling. You make a (relatively) small wager that pays out nothing if you don’t need it or potentially huge if you do.
We're clearly having different views on society. Yours seems through a strict financial lens, but correct me if I'm wrong.
> potentially huge if you do.
No, it isn't. You've just incurred a (probably larger) loss, elsewhere. There's no pay-off. Insurance makes large losses bearable for the individual and society. That's unlike gambling.
Appeal to definitions is rarely useful in such discussions. Insurance is not a central member of the category, since people rarely get addicted to filing insurance paperwork, but people very much do get addicted to sports betting.
“Is insurance gambling” is a question of definition.
You’re trying to argue that it’s not gambling because it’s beneficial. But that’s absurd because you’re trying to define gambling as specifically “bad” in a conversation of whether gambling is bad.
You can’t argue circularly and then gripe about clarifying definitions.
No, nobody's trying to argue that gambling is by definition bad – that is to say, nobody's defining the category boundaries of "gambling" contingent on possessing the property "is bad". Some people have constrained the definition of "gambling" such that it only contains things they view as bad, and then observed that all the things they consider "gambling" are bad, but that's not the vacuous, circular claim you make it out to be.
In lieu of re-quoting other parts of the thread, I'll instead ask you to please re-read the arguments people have made, more slowly.
> Some people have constrained the definition of "gambling" such that it only contains things they view as bad
If there is some internally consistent definition that excludes all the “good” stuff without excluding it specifically for being good, no one has shared that so far as I’ve seen.
The arguments about insurance so far have been “but it’s a good thing” and “you aren’t happy when your insurance pays out”. The former is exactly gambling==bad and the latter is just wrong. I could bet that a politician I despise will win and I won’t necessarily be happy that I won. I’ll be more happy that I got a payout than not, exactly the same as insurance. That’s what a hedge is.
Insurances are not hedges. Hedges are „investment position[s] intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment“ (wikipedia) of which insurances can be a part of, while in an insurance „a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury“ (wikipedia).
Absolutely not the same thing. But even so there is still an interesting insight to be gained from common parlance:
Usually we talk of a bet in a situation where you take an event that is somewhat out of your control and irrelevant for your wellbeing and intentionally and actively make some kind of material outcome for yourself depend on it. In so far speculation at stock markets is „gambly“, you are right about that. And if you have measures in place that hedge the risks of those speculations you might be tempted to very loosely call those your insurance.
If you look however at how the term insurance is typically used you can see a difference there: you insure against risks that are non-avoidable risks of your daily life or business. You do not intentionally and actively enter the cancer-lottery. And you do not actively take measures to win your „health-insurance-bet“ because the outcome is still considered catastrophic, even in case of „winning“ it.
And the way people tend to see things more as insurance vs. bets follows exactly these lines: is it about mitigating a devastating natural risk that is hard or impossible to avoid 100% or is it about something where you actively and intentionally attach your wellbeing to a random event. (We could separate this out in two questions: do you involve yourself actively and intentionally; and: is the outcome that you bet on inherently against your intrinsic interests. But that is a detail that I don‘t think we need to go into)
I think this explains the common parlance quite well: health-insurance: the risk is unavoidable, you do not willfully enter some kind of cancer-lottery on whose outcome you bet. Also you have an intrinsic interest in not „winning“ said „cancer-lottery“. -> no doubt it is insurance.
Legal expenses insurance: risks depend largely on your behaviour but you usually still have an intrinsic interest not having to use it. -> some people might see this as more gambling- or “bet-“ adjacent.
Speculating on one stock and hedging that bet. -> Totally not an insurance. Also not something insurances do. An insurance might be part of your hedge (maybe insurance of freight against loss) but insurers typically do not insure bets. Which makes sense, since part of their business-model is that the customer has an intrinsic interest that the payout case does not occur.
This whole thread started because someone essentially said “gambling is bad” and someone else said “not all gambling is bad; how about X, Y, and Z?” My point here is that if you sit down and define what gambling is in a principled and consistent way, you probably have to conclude that some good things are actually gambling. And that’s cool, because we can also then discuss what kinds of things that “maybe look like gambling” are actually a net positive vs net negative based on their impact rather than some division of “gambling” vs “not gambling” that is fairly arbitrary and leads to bias in how we think of them. You can’t have that kind of conversation if the definition of gambling includes “and it’s bad” because it’s tautological.
In specific response to your reply, I understand what you’re going for but you’re stretching definitions to meet your goals. The Wikipedia page you cite states clearly that insurance is a common hedge. And in your definition of a bet you state that it is “irrelevant for your wellbeing” as if a boxer wagers on their own fight wouldn’t be betting or gambling.
Your discussion of insurance vs bets is reasonable and I get what you’re going for, but I think the distinction is not as clear as it might seem at first. “I don’t want this payout” feels like a meaningful distinction but that Wikipedia page rears its ugly head and points out Hawking’s what-if-black-holes-aren’t-real bet that he wanted to lose. I wanted the Seahawks to win today. If I had put $50 on the Buccaneers would that have been a bet? Insurance? A hedge?
Regardless, back to my point. Maybe there is some criteria that disambiguates all the “good
Things that look like gambling but aren’t” from the “bad things that are clearly gambling” but I haven’t seen it yet. I think it’s all some level of gambling. If I roll through life without health insurance, I’m betting I don’t need it. If I buy the insurance I’m betting that at some point I will, or at least that the odds are good enough that I will that I should hedge.
> Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing.
This is a neat moral message… but is it really true? Gambling is addictive, so the reality might be that even without such deep social problems you get similar levels
Brenner, Brenner, and Brown wrote A World of Chance in which they draw from large reams of data and conclude that gambling is often used by those that see no other way up.
Gambling is addictive for some, in the same way that alcohol is addictive for some, yet blanket alcohol prohibition is not considered a great idea in hindsight.
I don't know how we could put limits on gambling that would make sense, though. There's a huge difference in bets that I used to make (which were all black-market sports bets, usually on 'game winner' or over/under) ~ once a week during the NFL season vs. the shit going on with FanDuel and all these phone-based gamified services. And that stuff absolutely encourages you to make bets that you can't afford and can easily turn into a problem even for someone who isn't 'addicted' per se -- it's like the predatory loot box model from video games.
TLDR I don't know how you write a law that would put hard and fast limits on what can be bet on and how much an individual is allowed to bet during a week in a way that would be palatable to the companies. I'm in favor of the blanket ban at this point; the black market for betting has always existed and it was better than the current setup.
I think banning or severely limiting advertising similar to cigarettes would be a good start. Stop having sports broadcasts be so intertwined with gambling, seeing odds on the screen when watching sports is gross.
You could make it so that if someone called the gambling hotline then they automatically are suspended from betting at all sports books for a year or something. Idk if this is the perfect policy but it took me about 5 minutes to come up with it.
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 think what you're saying is that society would benefit from a kind of lottery system that made it easy for people to earn a sizable amount of money randomly, without any sort of gatekeeping?
I agree with the premise, however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
it's not really lottery, that system has to involve growing a 'skill' such that one could possibly get 'good' and 'rewarded' at it, and that 'skill' doesn't need human approval, which will make it a true alternative to getting jobs. bonus points if one can scale it up.
Take daytrading for example, of the 99% who fail are they all gamblers or are they just tolerating enough failures until they get a positive expectancy?
> however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
Yea what I'm talking about isn't exactly a gambling system which will try to screw you over the instant you get some momentum of out a positive expectancy system.
> 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.
You are so wildly off base from my lived experience that I have to assume you have no experience with generational poverty.
You are not saving up to improve your life because the savings rate is too small to effectively matter. And all the savings you muster can be wiped out by, well, any extra expense. Car breaks down, medical copay, kid needs clothes due to a growth spurt, bank fees, etc.
If any chance event will break you, it is not entirely illogical to lean on chance to save you.
If you don't see light at the end of the tunnel, or you think that light is an oncoming train, you are not going to "act rationally" for arriving at the end of the tunnel.
Yes. Of all people, Jordan Peterson used to talk about this a lot. He said anybody will break from enough cycles of hard work with no reward, and that's when people do stupid things. The nickel and diming of everything alone is enough to drive a person insane if they don't make enough money to ignore it.
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.
> 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.
This seems to be pretty clearly saying that you think poor people only gamble with money they don't need and if they didn't gamble they would be able to stop being poor by investing that money. That seems a pretty clear statement that you think that poor people who gamble wouldn't be poor if they didn't irrationally gamble money that they should have invested in their future.
You say you have a "better grasp" of your opinion. I say you don't have a good enough grasp of it to present it in an understandable way since this "misinterpretation" of your view seems to match pretty well with what you've actually said.
Well that is progress because now you're attributing something to me that is close to what I do believe, which is poor people who gamble probably are poor because they make terrible financial decisions. I mean, you linked an article earlier suggesting that there are people who spend more than 5% of their income on lotto tickets [0]. No mystery why they're poor, they make bad decisions with money. In percentage terms, 25% of income in savings is probably the magic line where suddenly the whole thing becomes financially self-sustaining. 5% is not an inconsiderable chunk of that. Someone who just donates that sort of chunk to a gambling company is not competent with money.
But that isn't "poor people", and it isn't reasonable to just assume that poor people are all incapable. Most are perfectly reasonable people who happen to be poor despite generally being responsible with what money they do have. And presumably not throwing away 5% of their income for no good reason. I suppose I might be over-estimating poor people, but that isn't any reason for you to start misrepresenting my beliefs.
> I say you don't have a good enough grasp of it to present it in an understandable way since this "misinterpretation" of your view seems to match pretty well with what you've actually said.
Bullshit. You claimed my opinion was "poor people are poor because they're irrational". That is both a ridiculous statement and a gross mischaracterisation of what I said. Realistically I probably should get an apology, although getting you to understand what I actually wrote is enough for me.
[0] If you read the article closely though, that isn't actually mathematically guaranteed. Means can be deceptive like that.
I think you’re establishing a false dichotomy. By and large, poor people are poor because they’re irrational. The businesses that prey on poor people—shady used car dealers, payday lenders, bookies—are exploiting this very irrationality. If we lived in a society where everybody was competent and responsible, none of these businesses could survive.
Alas, human beings sometimes have imperfections that leave them vulnerable to these predatory businesses. What’s more, the very irrationality of patronizing these businesses obviates any objection to restricting consumer freedoms by prohibiting and regulating these businesses.
That take feels lazy. Poverty isn’t primarily about irrationality, it’s about constraints. People make decisions that are locally rational given their options, but the system they’re operating in is tilted against them.
If rent eats half your income and your car breaks down, you’re not choosing between “investing” and “consuming.” You’re choosing between keeping your job and getting evicted. Behavioral quirks exist, sure, but they’re downstream of scarcity, and scarcity itself warps decision-making.
We’ve got decades of data showing that when you remove the constant pressure (through cash transfers, healthcare, childcare, etc.), people generally make long-term, rational decisions. The idea that “the poor are poor because they’re irrational” mistakes the symptom for the cause.
It is propaganda to "other" the poor. It is much easier to blame irrationality for people being poor rather than the systems we choose to keep in place. Those who convinced you of this falsehood, what are they gaining?
People aren't helpless pawns and they aren't perfect either. There's variability in the human ability to make rational economic decisions, isn't there? So what do you imagine happens if someone routinely makes bad economic decisions?
I don't think this explains 100% of why poor people are poor, but it doesn't explain 0% of it either. And to bring it back to the original point, we need to recognize that certain economic decisions, like sports gambling, are virtually always irrational decisions, and there's virtually nothing to be gained by protecting the consumer's freedom to make those decisions.
You seem to have a load-bearing assumption that in order to care about the poor, we can't even entertain the notion that any of them could ever possibly have become poor as a consequence of their own imperfections. Why is that? It seems obvious to me that when people end up poorer as a consequence of their gambling addictions, the obvious solution is to prohibit or at least more strictly regulate gambling, not to just leave those people to their fate.
> It is propaganda to "other" the poor. It is much easier to blame irrationality for people being poor rather than the systems we choose to keep in place. Those who convinced you of this falsehood, what are they gaining?
That take feels lazy and a little bit like projection. I'm not "othering" the poor, I'm trying to understand at least one of the problems they face and what solutions are possible. And one of "the systems we choose to keep in place" is this recent innovation of allowing online gambling to proliferate and freely advertise on every platform, which directly contributes to gambling addictions, which can and do ruin people's lives. Who stands to gain? The bookies. Yet you're the one arguing that the addict who blows his kids' college fund betting on football is "making decisions that are locally rational given their options", and I'm the one arguing that we should make it harder for the gambling industry to exploit him.
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 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 you're banning Las Vegas, and even if that's the right thing to do, we don't have a ton of precedent for doing that much harm to corporate bottom lines. It took 50 years of incontrovertible evidence to do it to tobacco. It'll probably happen eventually, but in the same way. We won't outright ban betting, but it will be heavily marketed against, socially stigmatized, and banned from advertising.
Yeah I tend to agree with this. People have always bet on sports. Wodehouse wrote a story about bored rich guys in the countryside betting on children’s church games. The real question is, what has changed to allow this betting to occur legally?
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.
I disagree. What a high level professional gambler is doing is hard work.
Hard work doesn't make you rich, but it's part of the things that you need to prosper. I'm no inspirational poster child, but hard work, building a network, doing good things for people were all essential to my long term success. I didn't have the benefit of familial connections, but that helps too. There's a saying that you make your own luck, which is true... if you're not on the field, you can't get lucky.
People making a living playing poker is fine, but it's just like being a working musician, an investor or an athlete. I had a friend who made a living on horse better. You've developed a set of skills and have a usually limited window to cash in on them. The 95% of people gambling aren't attracted to the game of skill, and flop around with the 101 things to do in a gambling establishment that aren't poker.
I agree that hard work is often a pre-requisite for being successful, but it is not key to being successful by any means. Like I wouldn't agree with your definition because most people wouldn't claim that, say, getting into bitcoin early and then working like 10 hours a week max trading and setting up mining rigs is "hard work," even if it made some people extremely wealthy, just because they got on the trend early.
I guess people win the lottery too. Life is complex, there’s no one answer. And tbh, if I reflect on my own life, my comp is much higher than it has ever been, my peeps are very happy, and I’m not grinding by any means.
People who win the lottery often can't turn that money into a reliable investment vehicle. Like, if I won the lottery, I would probably become a VC or start building GPU farms. But that would probably still take a lot of work; I'm just saying some people have found a way to maintain wealth long term without doing a considerable amount of work.
Gambling was already very popular, but since the lockdown, the industry has grown exponentially. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391887687_The_Strat... - the research contains figures and forecasts for the next few years - and they’re quite impressive
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.
> you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich
I don't think anyone is getting rich from sports betting. It's not like the lottery, where the jackpots are massive and the odds are very long. And the jackpots get massive in the lottery because they accumulate when nobody wins, whereas in sports bettings, the gambler always either wins or loses, based on the outcome of the sporting event; there's no carry-over.
You are right customers are not getting rich from sports betting, but the true reason is that once 'the house', the betting company sees a consistent winner, it will ban them or lower their betting limit to discourage them from betting again. There are people that would get rich otherwise. Also betting companies are coordinating their odds to prevent arbitrage.
And also, of course: there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich. And betting company owners too. But you didn't mean those.
This is highly unlikely. Nobody has the magical ability to predict the outcome of sporting events.
> there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich.
This is highly unlikely for most of the things that Americans are gambling on, such as NFL games.
I was quite interested in one of the CEOs from a premier league team who runs StarLizard which is a private gambling syndicate focused on sports. They're making a lot of money off building models to predict sport outcomes.
I'm not sure if you'd discount that as obviously thats completely different than 1 person sitting in their bedroom placing bets but just thought I'd raise it incase this level of sports betting interests you.
From what I understand they place their bets in Asian markets rather than the markets consumers in the west would.
It is my experience from working in the sports betting industry for several years, including the risk reporting and risk managing part. In fact I'm pretty sure several people lived comfortable life by going around our risk management by using a loophole that was possible at the time in our country - it was possible to bet anonymously in person. So while we could limit maximum winnings per bet, we could not tie particular bets to persons, and they just placed several bets in different locations, or they used helpers.
I'm not going into speculations how they acquired the knowledge. Some people are just nerds, others sit at the stadiums and place bets right from there etc., but I'm pretty confident there are customers who are able to make money on sport bets and are not fraudsters.
So, this doesn't sound like just ordinary people who have lost hope.
The thing about lottery tickets, as opposed to sports betting is that the lottery requires zero skill. You buy a ticket, and if you get lucky and your numbers are randomly chosen, you win. Anyone can hope to win the lottery. But becoming a professional sports gambler, or a professional poker player, for example, is not really the usual response to losing hope.
Not that important, if you are able to win 150k USD/EUR a bet several times in a year.
> So, this doesn't sound like just ordinary people who have lost hope.
Not sure where the 'hope' got in, but in our country ordinary people are perfectly able to enter a bar and ask patrons to place a bet in exchange for a beer and a vodka. In fact the bar and the betting shop are often the same place.
> But becoming a professional sports gambler, or a professional poker player, for example, is not really the usual response to losing hope.
It's not the usual response but there is a sort of people who do this. They will not work 9-5 a stable good paying job although they are able to, but absolutely will put huge effort into finding a way to make money any other way.
Stock exchanges are not themselves anything like a casino. You can bet within them in similar ways, but you can also make bets at a stock exchange that you would never find at a casino.
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.
Pretty much any country. If you have $1m in assets you can simply stick it in a passive fund and earn more than the average wage in the highest earning countries. You can certainly live like a king in low cost countries.
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.
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.
There are many ways to use the financial markets that are not gambling. Buying an index fund or Coca-Cola isn’t gambling; it is not even very risky. Nor are individual stocks gambling, as you can get a reasonable idea of what a company’s price ought to be and how it is likely to perform in the future, at least for well-established companies. It’s also harder to get into debt, as long as you don’t short, because you can only spend money you have, and the stock does not become worthless if your analysis is wrong. (At least, there are warning signs)
Now day-trading? I consider that gambling, because any particular day’s price movement is a lot closer to random.
Buying a stock or mutual fund is the very definition of gambling: placing a monetary bet on an unknown future event. Just because this activity has historically had a +EV, doesn't make it any less gambling.
Purchasing a business or parts thereof is not “gambling” any more than purchasing a house is “gambling”. People purchase them (or are supposed to) for the value they provide either through income or asset appreciation in the case of businesses or shelter in the case of the house and not for the singular promise of some winning outcome unlike games of chance. The only expectation is that the asset purchased will continue to provide value throughout the period of ownership which is no more or less than what you would expect of many other assets or goods you might purchase and none of this is contingent on mere chance alone. Just because somebody quotes a ridiculously high or low price does not necessarily mean the intrinsic value of the asset has changed. Overpaying for an asset is not the same as losing money to a slot machine. Have I “lost money gambling” if I buy something in a store the day before it gets discounted? These are just risks that exist in any market. Do not confuse this issue just because some have decided to use them as mere vehicles for price speculation. People speculate on the price of eggs, oil and gold as well but that does not mean buying eggs for breakfast, fuel for your car or a gold necklace for your wife is “gambling”.
By this definition prime loans are also gambling. When you bet on something risky then you are gambling. When you bet on something not risky you are not gambling. Also consider that not investing will generally lose money over time due to things like inflation. If we define the goal to be holding as much value as we can, holding dollars is more risky than investing in many stocks (or bonds, which also have a risk of defaulting). A better definition of gambling is something like "taking unnecessary and unproductive risks."
I'm not sure I buy any definition of gambling that depends on the outcome. If you lose money or tend to lose money, then it's gambling, but if you win money or tend to win money, then we change the name to "investing?" Risk includes upside and downside risk.
It doesn't depend on the outcome. If a bank only does prime loans and spreads out it's loans multiple borrowers, has a good reserve ratio etc. and still loses it all, that still wasn't gambling. This is more clear if you consider that storing value in money is also risky. When you get paid in a currency, you automatically begin investing in it at the same time. This is even more clear with foreign currencies. If you got paid $1 million in Turkish Lyra and do not store that value somewhere else, that is more gambling-like than putting it in the S&P. I guess you can say that any time you increase the amount of risk in an investment to get more reward you are gambling. But you can invest in something other than USD with the same risk but with greater reward. For example you can invest it in US bonds (over multiple issues) which has a similar risk to the USD but a greater reward. Still, under such a definition, any business is gambling. We can accept that, but then we have no word that differentiates owning a grocery store from betting all your money on a coin flip, so then the word "gambling" becomes much less useful or really useless in my opinion.
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.
> bet the better off do gamble on the financial markets though
Much less. Something I’ve noticed is the parents of the wealthy teaching their children to invest versus e.g. day trade. In middle class or poor households, on the other hand, it’s not uncommon for the kid to be trading crypto instead.
Financial markets produce a net positive outcome for investors (gamblers), no? The average rate of return in the S&P500 is about 10% and it's considered the baseline for thr stock market.
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.
> Investing is putting money into (hopefully) productive use, like a company with revenue, in an expectation of a return
The big differences are time horizon, addiction and expectations.
The longer the term, the less actively one must watch it and the lower the expected returns, the more likely it’s investing. The shorter the expected turnaround, the more closely one watches numbers go up and down, and the more one is focused on turning multiples than yields, the more likely it’s gambling.
Any stochastic process can produce gambling behaviour. Only a positive-sum game can facilitate investing.
When you buy a stock, you're not contributing it to the company's productive use. If I buy $1000 of MSFT, Microsoft doesn't get an extra $1000 in their bank account to invest in their business. That $1000 is going to another bettor to settle his previous bet, and at some point in the future, I'll sell and get an unknown amount of money to settle my bet. Just because historically betting on the stock market has been +EV doesn't mean it's not still gambling.
If you buy MSFT specifically you'll get regular, fairly predictable dividend payments and not just an unknown amount of money in the future.
MSFT goes up a tiny fraction when you buy. That means MSFT employees with stock grants get a tiny "raise" courtesy of you and with no cost to the company. Microsoft can also use their more expensive stock to make acquisitions. So you are contributing to the company's productive use in at least 2 ways if you buy its stock.
Buying MSFT doesn't meet the criteria to be called gambling, for me.
Sure, but that's pretty indirect and a far cry from "putting the money to productive use." Unless you're an early investor or IPO participant, your actual money is not being directly put to productive use by the company you are "investing" in.
> that's pretty indirect and a far cry from "putting the money to productive use."
All finance is indirect. Particularly at small scale.
> Unless you're an early investor or IPO participant
Plenty of IPOs are entirely secondary. And public companies regularly raise money via at-the-market offerings, where a random trader may wind up cutting a cheque to the corporate treasury. (I’ve been a seed investor and IPO investor. My effects on the outcome were rarely singularly meaningful.)
In a large offering, a small IPO investor has about as much direct effect on the outcome as someone buying the pop publicly. In aggregate, however, their actions are meaningful and productive.
Put another way: contrast two economies, one in which most capital is tied up sports gambling (negative-sum game), the other in which it’s in equities (positive-sum long term), one will outperform the other.
Early investors and IPO participants put their money in expecting that 20 years later you would buy the stock off their hands. It feels weird to call it causation when it's traveling back in time, but in a way buying the stock contributes to investment.
I'd wager (heh) a bit of both. The distinction isn't that the affluent neighborhood gets to make its own decisions or be cared about by large corporations whose presence ostensibly enhances their quality of life, it's that poor neighborhoods don't. The reason the latter have these socioeconomically deleterious establishments is the same reason they don't get grocery stores or gyms: the people making the decisions don't see them as customers to serve, but as marks to exploit. And suddenly we're back to the notion that privilege isn't necessarily having it "better," but sometimes just having what most would consider the dignified standard.
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.
That doesn't feel like a very apt analogy. Poor vision or dyslexia can't easily be hijacked into a cycle of addiction the way poor impulse control can. Making a bit of money helping someone with poor vision is very different than blasting advertisements on every single medium and using predatory practices to draw in those with poor impulse control. Not to mention the continued exploitation afterwards until the victim has nothing left.
Making money helping people with poor vision (selling glasses) is fine, of course. I mean exploiting their weaknesses, like using a tiny typeface to write important price information while showing a big price-like number prominently. Doing something formally correct which turns into a trap because of the customer's disability.
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 also left my country years ago and come back once or twice a year. This year the city hall introduced a new parking app that can't be installed on a phone with an app store registered outside Romania, because the freaking parking app has a gambling section and they decided to go with gambling instead of supporting a universal parking app (like the previous one that they had) available also for tourists from outside the country. I called them out on that and said that they can't make it available outside the country because of legal issues with the gambling section....
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.
There are some differences: investment platforms wont kick you out if you manage to earn money. Gambling sites do that. If you are loosing a lot, gaming sites make your limits go up. If you are winning a lot, your limits go down. Investment sites dont do that.
They also assign "consigliere" to you if you loose a lot. He is supposed to create a personal relationship with you. If you try to stop playing, that person will try to get you back into gaming.
You are not betting against investment platform itself, you are betring against other people on it. That is major difference.
Yeah, the incentives are completely different between exchanges and bookmakers. Exchanges make money regardless of who wins or loses. Bookmakers make money from their users losing.
> 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.
I worked for a gambling syndicate. We often made money from bad initial prices. Many bookies tolerated us because they wanted to know what we thought was mispriced and rapidly adjusted their odds after we started betting.
It was a balancing act though. They really wanted to know what we were doing, but didn’t want to lose too much to us. So there was some give and take / bartering around the fair value of our information in the form of our accounts being banned and limited or bets being voided. But they definitely didn’t want to eradicate us.
> 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.
I have worked in the betting industry for several years. And the reason I'm writing is to tell you that while (2) sound logical, it was not used during my time in the industry. Or to be more precise, of course the odds are adjusted all the time to balance the market, prevent arbitrage etc, but it was also very common to have a 'loss leader bet', usually on the favourite, where the betting company would take a loss or make very little money if the favourite wins (but if that happens the customers still don't make a lot, because the odds are already low, and betting on a favourite is not a winning strategy because the real fav loss probability is higher than the odds would suggest). OTOH what is also often done is when 'real odds' are very high (low probability), the odds that are offered are way lower than the probability would suggest. So if 'real odds' are 100:1, the company would offer 50:1, so, even taking into account the company margins, you as a customers are never offered anything close to the real probability and as a consequence unless you are exceptionally good can never make money (and if you do your are banned).
It is your right as a human to waste your life away. It is also by definition immoral regardless of moral system (so long as 'waste your life away' is an accurate assessment within said moral system), but they are completely separate matters.
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.
It absolutely does account for that. Your entire comment is a strawman.
If that is not intentional (which I suspect it is not, so no offense intended), then I believe a quick search on “God-given rights” should help you make whatever case you want to in a logically consistent manner. It is a well-defined concept that has a specific meaning over a specific domain. I get the feeling “negative rights vs. positive rights” might be a useful search phrase as well.
The Judeo-Christian god does not exist, nor any other god, so I'm not sure what rights you're referring to. Are you referring to human rights? We don't need a religion to justify those.
Anyway, you said your argument accounts for it, but didn't actually follow through and demonstrate why that is. How does your argument take into account the aforementioned power imbalances?
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 asked because I noticed this strange cluster (for me) of people which want to ban some things like gambling or social media algorithms because they are exploitative and addictive, but who also want to legalize drugs. I had a feeling you might be in it.
Stranger, some of them want to ban/make it harder to distribute drugs "legally" through doctors (OxyContin, Sackler family scandal) because doctors might be monetarily incentivized, but then they also support complete drug legalization, including for the same drugs (fentanyl). This position is not even internally consistent, in this case fentanyl was "legalized" close to what they seem to demand, just gated by a doctor.
I don't have a clear position, but I don't think I would support legalization of "hard" drugs (anything above marijuana/MDMA). I can't see any positive, the negatives are clear, and it impacts the whole society (I will respect your freedom until it impinges on mine).
I am pro 2nd amendment, but I also believe the State should maintain it's monopoly on violence. Otherwise it's Mad Max world. The way the 2nd amendment is stated (prevent tirany) would not work anyway today, the military power of the State is vastly larger, the "militias" will never stand a chance against Police/Army/Cyber/... So I am pro guns just as far as personal protection requires (so no rocket launchers).
I was reading this chain of responses. They are great. The two of you are very thoughtful in your world view.
About your last paragraph: How do you feel about other OECD (highly developed) countries that do not allow personal gun ownership (except for hunting and sport shooting (clays, etc.)? Take Japan for example: Except for hunting and sport shooting, ownership of guns is not allowed. How do you feel about it?
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.
> 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.
To me, this is a very mature response. The whole idea of you do what you want as an adult and you own all of the consequences. Why do you make an exception for "emotional manipulation"? To be clear: I am not trolling in this post. I want to know why you think these things can be legal, but advertising about them is "morally bad".
Well, advertising as a concept is fine, but the industry is steeped in advanced, refined yet old-as-time-itself psychological manipulation tactics.
When addiction is intentionally engineered at a high level and wrapped in the Trojan horse of self-sufficiency or emotion, deceit, or the power of suggestion, we have a problem. Imagine Taylor Swift doing an ad for crack cocaine.
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.
Rights are merely a simplification of complex interactions. Societies are more focused on what benefits themselves than such simplification.
The minimal effectiveness of enhanced interrogation plus the desire of the population not to risk being so interrogated means people are generally apposed to such. Tracking down a nuclear threat is considered something of an exception to this stance by the average person.
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.
By customers you mean "people to sell stolen watches to"? Cause if that is the question, neither of these is a good place. Affluent people wont buy obviously stolen watches directly in the restaurant, they will go through middleman that makes them look legit.
And people being there to bet wont be buying watches that much either.
Irrelevant. I only bring up the stochastic element because of the implicit argument that people are being victimized by gambling against their will.
Since you would be extremely off-topic if you tried to extend this argument to, e.g., Daniel Negreanu engaging in a game of poker, I wanted to explicitly preclude individuals competently engaging in whatever activity is being deemed 'problematic.'
It was mostly to help the 'other side' stay on topic; otherwise, I could trivially refute their arguments by counterexamples, e.g., Daniel Negreanu.
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.
This sounds like Nevada. I remember arriving in the Reno airport for the first time and being astounded that there were so many slot machines around. Even CVS had slot machines!
> 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.
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).
> Gambling has always been a part of football. You mentioned the football pools, is this not gambling?
Did you read this part?
> 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
Losing or winning a pint or two once or twice a week isn't the end of the world. The pools involved putting numbers into coupons and sending them off each week, it cost you £2 or whatever, and that was it for the week.
Modern sports betting seems (to my untrained uninterested eye) to be about extracting multiple bets of £20+ an hour, seemingly competing with the coke dealers which is apparently a very common part of football nowadays for the income, and using similar tactics.
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.
> Legalization allows you to generate tax revenue and implement harm prevention effectively for the very small amount of users that are gambling addicts
You do not need legalization for harm reduction. But, the state earning on gambling means effective regulations will be against state interests.
Gambling earns mostly on addicts. Not on people who bet a little here and there. By extension, state will need those addicts existing and loosing money to get taxes too.
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
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
The statement "in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss" is ambiguous as to whether it's the gamblers as a whole or each of the gamblers making a net loss, and while I grant that it reads more like the way you're describing, the later context pushes the intended meaning in the other direction.
He says "The 'house' is the only winner," which is as a point of fact untrue - there are also individual gamblers who are winners. Saying this implies he thinks that each of the gamblers is a net loser.
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.
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.
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.
This very much varies state-by-state (ignoring prenups and emergency med treatment as edge cases). In my marriage and state (FL) debts incurred by me remain my own. Wifey owes none of it. Compare with states that have community property or purchases made as tenants by the entirety.
I remember when gambling was actually just illegal in most of the USA.
In my state, it was the state run lotto that was used to sell the idea "Hey we'll take lottery proceeds and fund education with it!!!!!". Of course, state-run lottery was legalized, and yes, the proceeds did run schools.
The next funding session, they CUT the existing funding to schools and had the lottery run the bulk of the funding. They naturally never said that part out loud.
And riverboat gambling was a quazi-legal thing. Then casinos were legalized. Then normalized gambling everywhere. Even the local groceries have state-run lotto vending machines that gobble 20's and 50's for a chance to strike it rich, or more likely, get poorer.
I prefer when gambling was decriminalized individually, but not endorsed for the state or companies to run. I also don't want cop squads cracking down on the penny or quarter games in peoples' houses.
I honestly think we had a pretty good middle ground with people having to go to Vegas/Reno/AC to gamble. It can be fun, but you have to go out of your way to do it. If you have a fun Vegas weekend and blow a bunch of money once in a while, that seems pretty okay relative to being able to constantly bet on anything from your phone.
I think it was Illinois' state lotto that encouraged Indiana to also unrestrict it initially for government based gambling ($1 scratchoffs and weekly lotto drawing). Pretty sure they also did the "school budget scam" by transferring tax proceeds from the lotto instead of adding it as well.
Again, though, news in the 1980's didnt have as much traveling power, unless it showed up in the NY Times or other national level papers. And the local papers actuually did local news then.
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.
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...
You can also see it as the more we let corporations bend and break the rules of our society the more we will see the monetization of things that harm us directly for some small group's material gain.
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.
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.
I've seen gambling destroying more lives than alcohol in my lifetime. And I live in the area which is rather on top of the world by alcohol consumption per capita.
I'm surprised at the lack of mentioning the effects of gambling on the thing being gambled on!
Sure gambling will always happen wherever there's something with uncertainty. But to make it fully legal opens the doors wide open for growth, leading to the only possible outcome of "more money being bet". I think it would be naive to assume that the integrity of any sport stays stable when such a large amount of money is staked on it.
I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically awful about sports betting. I do think that the way American corporations have set it up, though, has made it a lot more predatory than many fans want to admit.
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.
The author approaches the topic from a libertarian perspective with some prior beliefs about the futility of regulation. These restrictions are not permitted within their ontology, which in my opinion makes the damning conclusion more powerful.
I strongly disagree with the authors political stance, which makes the fact that we agree on the problem / solution a nice bipartisan result
I see adds for these companies all the time on Muni buses. It’s very frustrating, and I wish the city would be more choosy about who they let advertise.
The system is run so that the corporations are #1 and people just there to feed the economy. That's why sports betting is allowed. Advertising in public spaces is another thing as you've noticed. Those bright electronic billboards are a net negative to society but still allowed. Guess who needs advertising come election time?
It's been fascinating to see how outlets like the NYT (which owns The Athletic) have largely given sports gambling companies like Kalshi and BetMGM a pass on this, given the amount of pearl clutching animosity that typifies rest of their tech coverage. Guess sponsoring 90% of all sports related content has it's benefits...
It seems more direct to me: either you lose to the house, or you lose to someone else while the house gets a cut. Is that second part what you see as MLMish?
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
I think eliminating online sports betting, and requiring it be done within the physical confines of a casino may help mitigate most of the concerns around this.
After all, sports betting was legal in several states such as NJ, Nevada, as long as they were taking place in the casinos in Atlantic City/Las Vegas, and we didn't see any major negative impacts like we do now.
What I'd like to know is why did legalizing sports betting = complete change of the sports media landscape? Like the question asked doesn't seem to be around how sports betting has been integrated. it's just "is sports betting good or should we ban it."
Im fine with sports betting, what Im not fine with is my hockey games being saturated with ads, odds, and commentary about something that they keep telling us is tangential and not supposed-to-be-taken-seriously!
The whole thing is pathetic and I don't see how it's sustainable. There's going to be a Mothers Against Gambling movement or something after enough lives get wrecked.
And I'd like to add that most of the people throw the term around "lives get wrecked / ruined" flippantly around this, but that's exactly what it is. Your life is wrecked, you can't fix it, nothing can fix it. If only you never started gambling...
The problem isn't gambling. It's America's obsession with excess. There are always going to be people that get addicted but most people can enjoy it with limited downside if it's regulated properly, as it is in lots of other countries that have had legalised sports gambling for decades and more. Instead, sports in American have made gambling part of the broadcast and almost the point of playing the game.
I'm not sure why we're talking about sports betting as if the "sports" part is relevant. The gambling industry in general is the business of selling hope to hopeless people. All of it is bad, and as long as we have the states themselves selling hundreds of millions of dollars of lottery tickets primarily to those living in poverty, this is never going to go away. It should not be legal to make money off of other people's suffering, which is exactly what this is.
You should be able to make a friendly competitive bet with your mates or coworkers or even strangers without getting in trouble. I am even fine with businesses facilitating this with apps or whatever. But I don't think anyone should be able to bet so much that it could make it hard for their social financial obligations to be met (taxes, rent/mortgage, utility bills, child support, etc). Otherwise society ends up having to help feed, house, clothe, rehab these people. You are giving people the choice to substantially wealth and at worst be saved by the social safety net, many people would take that bet.
Gambling on aggregators and platforms is bad because you are the new kid on the block betting against experts, people with enormous computing power and of course win or lose you have to give a cut to the aggregator or the platform.
Gambling and betting should be 1v1 , as soon as you introduce a pool or an aggregator the wise advice is to stay away if such pool or aggregator has more than say a certain amount of bettors (100k-1M), because you become the new kid on the block and the new kid on the block gets skinned.
Thing is the implication of all the above is that we should stay away from every stock market and that would be quite right considering how it produces such loopsided outcomes, not unlike the gambling platforms or even worse
Everything is gambling . You are either gambling money or time or a combination or both to end up ahead in a particular metric that interests you
However gambling time is seen as virtous and to be celebrated, whereas gambling money is the devil.
At least if you lose money you can make it back, when you gamble time good luck getting back your 4 year studying for a gender studies degree.
Also here on HN gambling on a startup which most likely go to 0 is seen as amazing, whereas betting on the Jacksonville Jaguars to win the SuperBowl is seen as bad and to be condamned , even though the Jaguars bet is at least an order of magnitude more likely to generate profits than the startup one.
If I gamble by joining a startup, I am trying to provide something of value to someone. Otherwise, my startup will fail. The bet is not societally zero sum in expectation. Long odds, sure, but possibly value creating.
If I gamble on a sporting event, the outcome of the sporting event does not change. Someone wins. Someone loses. No value created. The outcome is societally zero sum in expectation.
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.
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.
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.
For one, we are just discussing financial ruin. Not deaths by guns or cars. And it does not impact you. Or else you would need to just regulate poor spending habits. At worse.
I think in principle just about everyone agrees in freedom and liberty where it does not affect society. We usually disagree just about what constitutes 'affecting others'.
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
It’s a completely legitimate question. It’s the same moral consideration behind whether drugs and alcohol should be legal. Banning them is good for people who can’t use them responsibly, but reduces the freedom of people who can. Given that we’ve flip flopped on the legality of alcohol, cannabis, and sports betting in the last 100ish years, it’s clear there is ambiguity about what is the best tradeoff.
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.
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.
If stocks did not have positive expected return no one would invest. What you're talking about is daytrading where there's a large failure rate so much so people call it gambling because of the nature of how swingy and illogical it can be.
Besides that, there's also the perspective that options help stabilize the market via hedging.
No one should be buying 0DTE options, it’s idiotic.
You should only use options as a way to make some extra money for actions you might have taken anyway, such as buying/selling a stock at a certain price.
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.
Because your money will at least get you a roof over your head. It's not a bet because it involves an element of chance. I can't believe you're seriously raising such an argument.
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.
> 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.
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.
The important distinction between gambling and options is that there are many additional information sources available to bias the outcome.
Options are a Bayesian game. Jane Street is much more likely to win than I am, but there are still rare cases where I could come out ahead with very high certainty (I know something they don't).
Card counting and being escorted out of the casino aside, there aren't any ways to acquire private information in a gambling context.
On a per transaction level, for every dollar someone makes on a put/call option, the other person has to lose equivalent. Even more when you factor in exchange fees
Hedging is just an additional transaction that limits the damage if the bet doesn't pay off. You can do the same thing in gambling.
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.
> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better.
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.
This cryptocurrency craze already happened in other places like South Korea where cryptocurrency user base is bigger and more active than the stock market, might be a glimpse at the future in the USA with SK's plummeting birth rate.
I think it’s rational in the same sense as insurance. Insurance is a small cost to cover the costs of a potential event that you can’t afford. Lotteries are a small cost for a potential event that you can’t afford not to benefit from.
The key is that in a well-functioning society and wisely-lived life, you don’t need to spend the cost on lottery because you can afford life/retirement without it’s winnings.
I don't think it's reasonable to compare the risk of suffering a large loss with the risk of missing out on a large gain.
If your annual income is $N, missing out on a gain of $N is bad, but not nearly as bad a suffering a loss of $N.
That is in interesting take. An underfunded insurance. "Your only chance is winning the lottery".
I’m genuinely curious to what extent the hardships younger people face economically are related to wasting huge amounts of time on screens. The average Gen Z person spends nine hours per day on screens. The average 18-24 year old American spends more than three hours per day just on social media.
I recognize all the various societal and structural factors that disadvantage younger people. At the same time, people have agency. When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same.
It is, of course, not entirely fair to criticize younger people given that there are teams of psychologists working to make these products as addictive as possible. So perhaps we older people need to do something about it. Yes, I sound old AF: “kids, get off your phones and do something useful!” Yes, I say this to my own kids, with little discernible efficacy. But I honestly wonder what you all think of this. Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?
Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them.
The “screen” effect doesn’t exist. But the percentage of students enrolled in cs programs grew a lot of the last few years, and I’ve seen the passion difference have an effect. Two friends of mine graduated last year. Both had zero offers out of undergrad (this is the norm right now, again, completely irrelevant to screen time). One of them was passionate about coding and kept working on side projects/leetcoding, eventually landing a role at a tech company after a year of working at a boba shop. The other, who struggled with coding and was verbally not passionate about it (complained about it a lot, didn’t interview prep much) ended up throwing in the towel a few months on the job hunt.
An anecdote, but probably generalizable across those in today’s job market. But the market is the core problem, second to the individual’s willingness to grind. Neither are related to screen time.
The hard job market drives more screen time. Less jobs, less money to spend at bars or any other third place that has become paid, less money to network. You aren't spending time honing your craft now, you spend times on hustles trying to launch your social media account or by doing gig work on deliveries and rides hating.
You spend more energy than ever making less money than ever and probably under more stress than ever over all the looming costs. That's not a state of mind where you just sit down at the end of the day and start working on your side project. Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate.
>"Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate."
Although I'm roughly half the age of the median HN user, and don't have a lot of life experience, one thing I've learned over the last few years - particularly during covid - is that people will accomplish success after a difficult circumstance, and will come out one of two ways (which often decides their core values, political leaning, empathy towards people in other difficult situations, etc.):
1. "I got through it, so anyone else can, too"; or
2. "I got through it, and believe no one else should need to".
One can also progress from 1. to 2. after living long enough, and realising how much luck has played into their fate.
It took me 10 years of career to realise how lucky I had been, even though I had put work and effort, in no way that alone accounts for my whole professional trajectory. A lot of it was due to sheer luck, by knowing the right people, at the right time, being in the right economical environment of a specific geographical place. Yes, you can work on things under your control to improve your chances with luck but it's still not something in anyone's entire control.
Believing purely in 1. is being blind to this aspect of life in general, a lot of achievements only happened due to luck, there are other thousands of people who were not as lucky and over time it completely changed their paths in life.
That is a pretty broad use of "it".
It could be having to accept working at a boba shop for a year during labor market fluctuations. It could even be having to choose a different career altogether if the demand in that market simply no longer exists.
It could also be losing one's home because their kid got sick and they had a job that didn't offer PTO. Or a mom not being able to breastfeed because their government doesn't offer paid parental leave.
> Hardships do come from high screen time, definitely. The poor job market is not one of them.
This times a thousand. I wouldn't have the jobs I do today if I didn't spend probably on balance an unhealthy amount of time in front of my own screens in the 90's. I got into programming because I loved screens and wanted to make them show me different things.
The difference today is two-fold IMO:
* The job market, as stated, is shit, especially for tech right now. For decades kiddos have been propagandized into going into a future in comp science of varying depths and qualities, both here in the US, and overseas. We have more tech workers than ever, wages are falling because of over-supply, and too many are focused on niche framework technologies who's skills don't translate well across the wide breadth of what's actually used in industry. Example: my company is hiring right now and it's DIRE to try and find mobile developers who actually develop in Kotlin/Java/Swift/Objective-C. I'm drowning in resumes for React developers but we don't use any of that and have no desire to.
* The screens now used by would-be budding hackers are locked down to hell and back, and were put in their hands when they were likely still shitting in their pants (no judgement of course, we all did it for awhile) and they don't conceive of them as "machines I could play with" but instead, simply as a never ending font of distraction and entertainment, perfectly curated to their individual desires.
I took the ancestor comment to be more about the "3-4 hours a day on social media" than time on a screen doing something like learning/improving programming skills.
Now, if you're spending three hours a day writing your blog and promoting your reputation as a skilled developer that's possibly going to help you. If you spend it surfing TikTok that's almost certainly going to do nothing for you. Though back in my 20s I could waste hours just watching stupid shit on TV.
It's possibly harder now to get a great job offer right out of school, but getting a lot of rejections as a new graduate isn't new either. It used to be a thing for seniors near graduation to paper their living room or hallway with all their rejection letters.
Most people are average. They will end up with average jobs and earning average money. One negative thing about social media is that it makes the top overachievers seem normal, and when you compare their lives (at least as they portray them) to your own it can make you feel hopeless.
>If you spend it surfing TikTok that's almost certainly going to do nothing for you.
On the contrary, it's likely to substantially misinform you and wreck your attention span. That's not very helpful though.
We both lived through an era where there was a sense of community, even online, I would also spend boatloads of time learning how to program in my youth some 20+ years ago but that was around the same IRC channels, the same forums, with people who were in those spaces for years.
I would bond with them through this shared hobby, make acquaintances, even friends, people who you could recognise even if it was just a nickname.
My first real software development job was through friends I met on IRC and forums, they knew me for years, and offered me an internship after we had worked on a hobby project for a Ultima Online game server.
Fast-forward to now, it is really hard for young people to find shared spaces with a sense of community, in the real world or online. Everything they experience online is through mass platforms where everyone is basically anonymous even though it became much more common to share your real name. How can you bond with someone in the comments section of a YouTube video about your hobby? Or in the comments of some TikTok/Instagram post that was quite interesting? You simply can't, that post or video will disappear from others' feeds, there's no sense of permanence of the members of a community.
I think the closest to this experience might be some Discord servers, it's one of the ways I found to try to meet people on my current hobbies but the experience is still very different than the tight-knitted groups of IRC channels from the past. Forums, for the most part, were eaten by reddit, for some hobbies there are still quite a few active ones but the discoverability is much worse, you will have to jump through some hoops (usually starting on a subreddit) to find one of those.
My feeling is just that community in general is in decline, I'm lucky to have managed to keep finding these bubbles and sticking with them, online or in the real world, but when I talk to my colleagues in the 20-24 age bracket I sense they simply don't have communities. They have a few friends who they might meet for a shared activity but they generally don't know a place where they can go and meet other similarly-minded folks.
The screens end up as a bad refuge to try to find these connections that were much more natural when we were young.
> Everything they experience online is through mass platforms where everyone is basically anonymous even though it became much more common to share your real name.
And sadly even this diminished engagement you are talking about is somewhat optimistic in that it assumes the people they are interacting with on mass platforms are even real people, which is increasingly not the case.
This feels like you’re metaphorically walking around with a hammer looking for a nail.
> Do I have a point or is this just victim blaming?
A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B
so the nihilism is real and warranted, if they don't inherit at least a downpayment for a house from you while you are still alive, the jobs available - even for highly pedigreed people - don't provide the income for the downpayment, for the most part. they would need arbitrage with high paying work in a very low cost of living place, for a long time, or the same but coupled with a socioeconomic equal who also doesn't want any gaps in their high income employment.
many new-money parents want their children to prove... something... related to income and autonomy, which puts inheritance while living into "entitled handout" territory, instead of practical. while due to lifespan, any inheritance will only reach the child when the child is 60+ years old, where its impact to the utility and direction of their life is nullified, and it's just bean counting for the mere concept of "keeping money in the family" but doesn't give anyone a leg up in social status, partner selection, even where you own children's children go to school.
(note: if you actually are not confident in your retirement income and end of life care costs, then you are not parent this applies to. for parents sitting on big wins in real estate and other capital, it does.)
but the financial reality doesn't really support this slower moving culture. the share of people in the US that are both homeowners and married by age 30 has fallen to nearly single digits percents. Aside from marriage being less attractive too, many delay everything related due to being preoccupied with meager work and financial instability.
now that being said, the thing you are more familiar with, hustle, does still work. pumping earnings into an investment property somewhere less expensive does still work, only suboptimal because they would still need to be paying rent in the higher cost of living area. what's different is that burnout is just not valued any more. hustle culture itself is not valued, its nothing to brag about and a silent path one might pursue. while experiences are valued. entire generations of people watched gen-x and boomers delay gratification and saw their bodies fail by the time they reached the finish line. its seen as a cautionary tale, not discipline.
so yes, lots of people overcorrect into a defeatist attitude, but the incentives support it. normal jobs won't get them anywhere, high paying jobs also won't get them anywhere, the training for high paying jobs doesn't guarantee a high paying job either.
I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I guess one theory, then, of excessive screen time is nihilistic too: if you can’t get ahead, why not spend your time absorbed in an alternate reality, perhaps including alternate realities where you can get ahead, like GTA.
That said, what I see in young people around me (because of my age, there’s quite a few) is a lot of addiction, not nihilism. These are kids with opportunities based on their socioeconomic status and yet many are just wasting huge amounts of time. The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold? And what happens to society when a generation is sucked into what they themselves literally refer to as “brain rot”?
>The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold?
Sure. But that bar is sky high now because it's very easy to ignore you otherwise. If you're not already running a successful company, releasing some viral piece of media, or publishing some novel research, you're going to be ignored. Having a 4.0 GPA with multiple interesting side projects and even an internship isn't necessarily getting you a job out of college anymore. Or at least, for now. Things you need to do to be noticed basically mean you already have means to somewhat sustain yourself.
> if you can’t get ahead, why not spend your time absorbed in an alternate reality, perhaps including alternate realities where you can get ahead, like GTA ... That said, what I see in young people around me (because of my age, there’s quite a few) is a lot of addiction, not nihilism.
I think we both conclude that its not a conscious choice, screens are addictive.
I also think many people levying this scrutiny are just as addicted.
I took a community college class a few years back and for the first few sessions I was fidgeting, until I course corrected because I knew that was abnormal for me from the last time I was in formal education. My ability to course correct made me think about how younger generations may be at a disadvantage because they don't know any other way to operate.
> The underlying question behind my post is essentially, does Cal Newport’s theory of success - so good they can’t ignore you - hold? And what happens to society when a generation is sucked into what they themselves literally refer to as “brain rot”?
I think it holds, income and work look different to many people. A steady high paying job is still optimal for a broad population, but being influential on social media or making a roblox game, all of which is built in the ecosystem they spend time on, seems practical too.
> When I was in my early twenties (twenty years ago) my job was software development and my primary hobby was…software development. I was constantly improving my craft, primarily just because I loved it. Many of the people I worked with were the same.
So... you spent a lot of time in front of a screen, huh?
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 agree with this 100%, it's not just gambling it's that the idea there's a steady path you can follow to success has basically disappeared. In a survey[1] asking how much money was required for financial success, Zoomers averaged $10MM, almost double millennials and 10x boomers.
A lot of people online took the opportunity to criticize zoomers as out of touch and financially illiterate, but I think most people under 30 have looked at the trends over their lifetime and determined that their lives are going to have so much volatility they need a massive amount of money to weather the storm.
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/01/20/gen-z-9-5-million-financially...
Yeah, after doing the numbers, 5M makes sense for my generation. But of course it depends on what "financially successful" means. This isn't defined in this piece, so I defined it as "can myself for a career, save for retirement, and pay off any emergencies". My current yearly expenditures are $60k or so, so if I give a 50% buffer for taxes, savings, and emergencies funds, then take that over a career of 40 years... 3.6m dollars.
And to be fair, my expenditures are very small compared to most others. No loans, no major medical issues, single person living alone. Having a family easily triples this number and we get right on that 10m figure.
The incomes are still wonky, though. I don't know how financial success is double, but income demands are tripled.
> $10MM
Ah, so they are just basing their life decisions on falsehoods then? lol
I know the world is different now, but I graduated high school in the wake of the 08 financial crisis. A lot of this Zoomer doomerism sounds like what people said about millennials.
But I (and my future wife) just went to a state school with in-state tuition. Got tech/eng degrees with some debt (5 figures). Have worked in the industry with ups and downs (including layoffs) for a decade or so now. Paid that debt off. Lived in a high CoL city in a nice apartment. Got a nice house after 5y of saving (but not being super frugal, just savvy I'd say. e.g. drove the same 08 Civic the whole time). And now we have a baby and only one of us works at all (and the other WFHs).
We didn't get giant donations from our parents (although some reasonable college savings helped, which I am repeating for my kid). Didn't go to prestigious fancy schools. Didn't even exceptionally excel in school.
But the key was to not throw our hands up and say the system is fucked. It's waxed and waned since that 08 crisis, and not participating is the main way to have lost. So yeah, thinking insanely wrong stuff like you need 10 mil to succeed is just stupid and self sabotaging haha.
The 10MM figure might be a falsehood, but I think that you're falling for the same thing previous generations have fallen for: Assume that because it worked out for you, it will work out the same for the current generation.
I'm not sure that it's an accurate view of reality this time. And to be clear I'm older than you, so this isn't me being a doomer and throwing my hands in the air about my own future. This is me noticing that if I myself can't afford a house in my city, how is the younger generation supposed to do it? They simply can't, not after only 5yrs of savings at least. Not even if they cut down on avocado toasts.
Leading up to me buying my home, the narrative was about how expensive houses are - especially in my city (Seattle).
But now on the other side, I got so lucky to buy one when I did (2020) due to interest rates.
Savvy also comes into play. The most affordable decent Seattle houses then were like $750k for sub-2k sqft well outside the main parts of the city. But Tacoma had 3k sqft houses for under $600k. 45ish minute reverse commute to Seattle bustling-est neighborhoods for evening fun. When we discovered this we pulled the trigger and it was the best financial decision we ever made along with going to college.
I agree it's a shame that owning in the biggest city (especially the nice parts) is hugely expensive.
> 45ish minute reverse commute to Seattle bustling-est neighborhoods for evening fun
What is a "reverse commute"? Is that just going into the city at the opposite time of day from normal work?
Also, 45 minutes one day (1.5hr total) is a rather large chunk of the evening to spend in transit for "evening fun."
> I got so lucky to buy one when I did (2020) due to interest rates.
It's funny, I remember thinking that people buying in 2020 were nuts because none of us knew what the economy was going to do, and it turns out that those who did buy came out ahead. I cite this among friends as one of the many ways in which I feel like being cautious with money has been the wrong choice (e.g. maintain 6mo-12mo emergency fund, don't make large purchases in periods of uncertainty, etc).
I don't know. If you're definition of success is owning a home and having a family, it gets close.
you need to clear 1-2m for that house by itself in any mid-high COL area right now.You need another 1-2m in 18 years to take care of your kids (they can live on less, but is that "successful"?). In 20 years we're already talking about 3-4m dollars before we even dive into the other bills and emergencies to address.
We have to remember that "financially successful" isn't some precise term. Some may treat "able to eat food and keep a roof over head" as successful, where others may see "can raise a healthy family" as so.
Was that survey over total earnings or savings? Like yeah..a few million tucked away will allow me to not work again. Or I can just work for a few decades like a normal person lol.
But precisely because "financially successful" isn't a precise term, the concept can be and is manipulated by smooth operators. It's always possible to construct a plausible argument that true success lies just beyond what you could reasonably expect to make through your own efforts (and therefore you might as well throw your money at me for a chance to achieve it). I don't think we can separate Gen Z's incredibly high standards for financial success from the amount that they're marinading in ads for gambling, crypto, and scam investments.
Any anecdote will suffer from survivorship bias (and also negative anecdotes). The data on the other hand are very clear that people are not doing as well as their parents. Unless you have a theory as to why Americans simply became more lazy, etc. a starting point should sensibly be a systemic explanation.
Also, just speaking about your anecdote, let me add my own. I am also doing fine. Not particularly rich but middle class, good income, and savings for retirement. But I just got hit with compounding dental issues, which despite having the most expensive health insurance from my company that's well known for providing excellent employee benefits, it will end up costing me at least 20k out of pocket, potentially going up to 30-40k due to the need for multiple surgical procedures.
And fortunately we can manage it, but if the same issue had happened to me 5 years ago, I would basically be at the edge of my savings where even a minor unexpected cost would have put me in terrible shape, and 10 years ago I may have had to declare bankruptcy, or more likely, do without either suffering in pain, or pushing off the problem to be handled by even more expensive work a few years down the line, taking on expensive debt, or setting myself up for periodontal disease which leads to a whole host of issues including significantly increased risk of dementia.
Even if one is earning and saving decently, the precariousness of life in the US of A today is incredible.
Shouldn't you expect Zoomers to be more than double millenials? They're 20 years younger, which means money is 4x cheaper.
Yes, I am not seeing any problem with the $10M figure, assuming one wants to insure against old age health expenses, insure against loss of income between age 50 and 70, and be able to to travel here and there between the age of 60 and 80.
For a current 20 to 30 year old, they should expect SS benefits to come at a higher age, probably 72 or even 75, and whatever benefit amount they get will buy less than what it buys today. And they will have to shell out for better quality healthcare (i.e. a couple decades ago, they might have seen a doctor, but today, they see an NP/PA, and in a few more decades, they might not even get that).
The big expense is insuring against loss of income between age 50 and whatever age government benefits start. Most people will never make their way up the income ladder again, so they need to make sure they have adequate savings by then, otherwise they are cooked, and those are the ages that healthcare expenses start adding up.
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.
What are the 13yos doing? Is there some fake-money sports betting platform or are they able to burn real money on it?
One of my biggest complaints with Steam is that it's basically an unlicensed casino with extra steps -- and one of the things you could do at one point was buy a "challenge pass" for a major tournament that was effectively a "pick 'em"-style bet on the outcome. There is no age gating on this, outside of a click-through prompt since the game is rated ESRB M/17+ and its equivalents.
1. You buy an event pass
2. The event pass contains a "coin" that can be upgraded, and grants access to a "pick 'em" interface
3. Based on the outcomes of the matches and your picks, the coin is upgraded
4. The upgraded coin allows access to "souvenir packages"
5. The "souvenir packages" and their contents (rare and/or unique weapon skins) can be traded on Steam's marketplace for store credit or currency
My son has mentioned friends whose fathers let them place bets. “Hey, who do you like for the wildcard game tonight, I’ll put a tenner ($10) on it for you.” It’s not seen the same way as a parent giving giving their kid alcohol or other age-gated things like that.
Interestingly, considering the role that sports have in day to day social discourse & self-identity with teams (“we” need to win this game), I’ve heard a few acquaintances say basically “placing a bet makes watching it more interesting, it’s too boring otherwise”. And given the social/identity thing you can’t not watch it. “Hey you catch that play last night? ‘We’ fell apart, awful…” gotta be able to keep up with the tribe chants.
> let's make it interesting
to which I've always responded, "How would that make it interesting?"
When I was 13 my parents would let me have a (small) glass of wine with dinner.
I'm sure many parents place proxy sports bets for their kids. Maybe to teach them how to use betting as a form of entertainment and learning how your money can also just disappear. I can see it being a good thing if done carefully. I can also see it going wrong.
> I can see it being a good thing if done carefully.
My experience with raising three kids is there’s a limit to the amount of messaging that gets through with any fidelity. So, the only financial teaching I did with them, was the stocks, bonds, diversification, risk and prudence schtick. I could see the attempted teachable lesson about gambling losses going sideways and crowding-out the rest.
I was pretty much the same way with my kids, with one more detail: Teaching a reasonable level of skepticism about advertising, marketing, and peer pressure in general.
There is a out zero chance it is done carefully or done to teach them "money disappears". Be serious. It does not even make sense as a lesson.
Give your kid $50. Place bets for him as he wants. When his balance hits zero, discuss.
You could do that, but it seems kind of obvious and condescending? Cause right now you can forbid it and theyll see all their friends lose money and never win anything until your child is of legal age. For everyone else, it seems like some kind of inherited cultural addiction that gets culturally passed down. Just openly mock gambling as evil/a scam/rigged and they'll probably be more likely to pick that up if you back with principals instead of taking the weak, confusing, and contradicting stance of feeding $50 into the evil system.
I think the point is saying something is "evil" is very unlikely to discourage young people from anything and even more likely to make it sound exciting and edgy.
It's like Oscar Wilde's famous quote: "As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular."
My parents did something similar for me, and I still remember the lesson a few decades later.
I think the details matter here. If you give your child $10 every month to make one bet, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose; you are doing it wrong. If you give them $50 and let them make a series of bets not exceeding $10, they will learn that the curve sometimes goes up, sometimes goes down, but ultimately ends up at zero. Not because "you were not lucky today, but maybe the next time", but because this is how the system works.
There’s one called Stadiumlive. Several are out there.
At least one kid I know has a Sportsbook app on his phone setup by his parents.
I was so disappointed my first and only time visiting a casino. I thought it'd be full of show girls, rich people, James Bond types in tuxes...you know, the way they are often portrayed in movies.
Nope. 99% slovenly dressed elderly banging lifelessly away at slots. The other 1% lonely, middle aged men.
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".
The combination of anime children, terms like "degeneracy", and crypto shilling is frankly extremely repellant.
He's living proof, I suppose. Why care about image of you think the world is burning around you anyway?
I dislike the author's framing of this in terms of right-wing meme culture, but almost all of the analysis is nevertheless correct. An orthodox Marxist could make essentially the same argument using different terminology - except about the inevitability of the trend continuing forever.
> except about the inevitability of the trend continuing forever.
Which is important because it yields completely different behavior from the believer...
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.
> has the possibility of making your rich
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
In sports betting contexts, you're often just betting against other players, I believe. If they're anything like prediction markets, the exchange isn't going to care how successful you are, as long as you're betting.
They're not like prediction markets. They do exactly what GP says they do: if you win, you effectively get banned (max bet sizes shrunk toward $0). If you suck, they do the reverse and expand your max bet sizes and offer you loans.
These things are so unfathomably antisocial that I earnestly believe every single politician who advances them should be (journalistically) investigated as extensively as is legally possible.
There are lots of places where you can bet against other players now. The older betting markets like Betfair are no longer available in the US, but Kalshi, Polymarket, and others now offer the same kind of two-sided marketplace in the US.
Not only do winning players get quickly banned like sibling said, the house take on the major platforms is vastly higher than with traditional sports betting.
>the house take on the major platforms is vastly higher than with traditional sports betting
What kind of markets is this referring to?
Polymarket still charges 0 fees. While Kalshi's fees+spread can approach or even exceed traditional sportsbooks on some markets, neither of them have any interest in banning winning players, as they don't take a side on any bet and directly benefit from more betting activity. Kalshi also pays interest on bets, which can add up on longer term positions.
Betfair has operated with a similar model for decades in the UK and elsewhere.
I was referring to platforms like DraftKings, which are extremely sleazy. I think Polymarket and similar low/no fee markets on the other hand are awesome.
There is parimutuel betting, but the payouts change based on the final pool size
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.
When Denmark liberalized gambling small "casinos" with slot machines and sports betting started to pop up everywhere. Those wouldn't be an issue if it was regular people popping Friday afternoon to get a coffee and spend $10 - $20 on the slot machines and perhaps put down a few bucks on this weekends big game, but you're right, it no.
The addicts and lonely line up waiting for these places to open, they spend everything they've got and the gambling places encourage it by providing them with free coffee, snacks and in some cases dinner.
No, gambling isn't immoral, but praying on the addicts, the mentally challenge and the lonely is. If you can't stay in business without exploiting the weak, you have no right to exist. The only negative consequence I see from banning gambling is the potential dangers of a black market.
And that is demonstrably very high.
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
Moreover, one simply needs to look at which games casinos select to see how not only does the house always win, but it chooses to win more and entertain less --- Faro was once a popular game, and by all accounts is a great deal of fun to play, but a Faro table does not make as much money for the house as Blackjack and other games, so one doesn't see them in casinos these days.
In the Abrahamic tradition, seeking benefit by avoiding labor is sinful. I don’t think it needs to be widespread to serve as an example. One data point that widespread gambling was eroding norms was that professional gamblers could not give testimony.
OK, so what is to be done when access to labor is gatekept? If you can't have a job, or can't benefit from a job beyond "give a man a fish, he eats for a day", are you not meant to look for an opportunity to generate income outside of working?
If you’re a bookie, and an adherent of these Iron Age religions, then you might be instructed to Render upon Caesar. If being a bookie means feeding your family, you can relax so long as you realize that your responsibility is to slightly nudge the right players to win.
> OK, so what is to be done when access to labor is gatekept?
The unemployment rate in the US is 4.3%.
Before you say anything, the U-6 rate is 8.1%.
Okay, so 30 million people, or more conservatively 16 million people. Same question, and before you say anything, don't be condescending.
ETA: Maybe most conservatively, let's use only the % uniquely included in U-6 and excluded in standard, or 14.4 million people. I'll claim these 14m people are the "gatekept from full employment" in that they don't qualify as narrowly unemployed unless you include "all people marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons"(1)
Same question. 14m people who are being excluded from labor, are they not free to attempt to generate income via means other than labor, lest they suffer the judgement of Abraham?
In other words, is Abraham hiring? If not, are the people he refuses to employ meant to accept serfdom to preserve their soul?
(1):https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
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
> which is an extremely misleading move on your part
No, I was pointing out the hypocrisy with the Catholic view.
You are adding to what I pointing out about the wiki and Christianity generally not having a problem with gambling itself: "The Catholic Church holds the position that there is no moral impediment to gambling" -- again no moral issue with gambling itself. Your source to back up your argument is simply not what you made it out to be.
I think it’s fair to say that the Catholic opinion is very much against the type of widespread gambling that is prevalent today, especially in the sense of it having negative social effects.
I don’t think that is hypocritical, more just nuanced. Church bingos aren’t putting people into poverty.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06375b.htm
Your critique of my initial comment seems to be hinging on the single phrase of gambling itself. I just meant the commonly used sense of the word, today, which IMO implies the aspects that the Catholics label as negative. (I.e. most people don’t call bingo a gambling activity.)
But sure, Catholicism has a nuanced view and it’s inaccurate to say they are against gambling in itself.
The post of your I replied to with the source says
> 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.
Yes, that was how it reads to me, that gambling itself is frowned on; based on the post that reply was for where they stated "I would say gambling in itself isnt immoral." and that the problem is addiction and money. And I also agree with that. But gambling is gambling and while no part of it is immoral to me (I hold higher standards for that word), there are major issues with it due to greed.
Which is what your souce is saying Christians have a problem with, not it being widespread or happening at all -- simply the trying to get rich, the addiction to money -- thats the sin. Not gambling, gambling is fine; it's when it turn into a money issue, then there is a problem. And that can happen at your local bingo parlour or Macau, or Vegas or the back-room of a gas station or your buddy's poker game. The Christian bible/church have an issue when greed happens, not gambling (widespread or not).
I think this distinction is not actually useful in real life, where 99% of the money problems are from certain types of gambling and not from others. When people discuss gambling, they aren’t talking about bingo games and school raffles, they’re talking about the thing most people mean by the word gambling.
If the root problem is greed how is making that distinction not useful in real life?
What does the type of gambling matter? If we focus on the core issues: greed and money problems -- over trying to "protect" [my emphasis] others from the bad gambling -- we end up helping them with adjacent greed/money problems. Labeling outside things as the problem is the problem. Help the people learn to master the inner compulsion towards these things (and other skills to help pull themselves out of dire situations); the rest is just trying to find an enemy to blame because helping others in a real way is hard.
In the same way distinguishing between heroin and codeine is useful. You can get addicted to either, but one sure makes it a lot easier.
> widespread gambling = negative social effects
Though this is conflating correlation for causation. As you note yourself in GP, dire social conditions is what makes people see gambling (or risk-taking more generally) as one of the only viable options to get out.
Just because the causation goes one way doesn't mean it cannot go the other way, too. We call those vicious cycles.
Yeah but those are separate claims. "Lead causes health problem, and vicious cycles are a thing, therefore health problems cause lead!" is not a valid shape for an argument. It may well be true, but both directions have to be established before calling it a vicious cycle.
In this case, I can agree bad social conditions cause gambling, but I don't think the data supports the opposite, at least not more than many other things we take for granted, such as
- alcohol,
- beauty/fashion industries,
- social media,
etc.
You don't think gambling causes negative societal affects to any greater degree than the fashion industry?
I've not heard any convincing arguments in favour of that hypothesis, no. Have you met young women? They self-harm over unrealistic ideals.
Cause-and-effect relationships can be complicated and it is important not to jump to conclusions, but do you deny that there are millions of Americans who can correctly identify an addiction when they see it in someone they have some sort of ongoing relationshp with (either because they have training and experience in treating addiction or because they themselves or someone close to them were once addicted)?
Do you deny that those observers can correctly identify the substance or the activity that the addict is addicted to?
Do you deny that addiction is quite deleterious both to the addict and to the people with whom the addict is in some kind of relationship?
Many news stories claim that many Americans (young men particularly) are getting addicted to online sports betting. Do you dispute the accuracy of those news stories?
If so, can you guess as to the motivation for publishing these inaccurate news stories? Often a campaign to mislead the public is done because some group would gain something quite valuable if the campaign is successful. What would any group have to gain (aside from a slightly healthier country) from a successful campaign to make online sports betting illegal?
I do not dispute any of that. Many young Americans also get addicted to alcohol. Many young Americans self-harm over unrealistic ideals brought to them by the beauty/fashion industries. Many young Americans get depressed over social media.
We need to help these people, but we do not help them by driving their vices underground.
So, how should we help all the groups of young Americans you mention?
Strong, publically-funded social safety net is a good start, I think. Using vice taxes to contribute money to it is probably a decent idea.
The gambling industry has funneled a ton of cash into academic researchers producing papers that gave credence to the idea of "addictive personality," which in turn was massaged by PR experts into the notion that some people are just born addicts, and the gambling industry can't help it if they become addicted to gambling too. "Addictive personality" itself is on very shaky grounds statistically, and the derived PR messaging certainly is false. The gambling industry is likely more culpable in this mess than even a typical, generally well-informed person might be aware.
"Addictive personality", now there is a deprecated phrase!
In drug rehabilitation, the phrase is no longer used. Instead people have a bingo card of disease, conditions and syndromes to go with addiction. Once people have been pigeon-holed in a dozen ways then the die is cast, these conditions are no longer imaginary, you have to hold yourself up in life because X, Y and Z prohibit you from even giving it a go.
Regarding the article, I detest organised gambling, however, relatively few chronic gamblers end up homeless and destitute. You need a good dose of class A drugs and a smorgasbord of childhood trauma to guarantee the truly negative outcomes.
I don't object to gambling amongst friends, even if it is on a card game. I might bet someone that they can't beat me on Scrabble, but I would be getting the dopamine hits from laying some massive, high-scoring words on the board to devastate my fellow players, but winning that £10 just ups the stakes and my competitive drive. If I am just betting on a sport (or even a Scrabble game) played by others, then it isn't quite the same.
What does amaze me about modern day gambling is that you know it is rigged. I don't trust an app to honestly flip a coin for me. My version of the app would be 'if heads show tails and vice-versa most of the time'. Yet people pour their life savings and some more into apps that are black boxes with no way of peeking inside to see how it works. The seasoned gambler must know that every game is rigged and that the house always wins, but they still queue up for another spin.
In terms of negative outcomes - suicidality, etc. - problem gambling is roughly equivalent to an opioid abuse or meth.
> relatively few chronic gamblers end up homeless and destitute.
They rank up unpayable debts and their married partners end up being legally obligated to pay half of that even after divorce.
Getting life together after gambling is super hard to impossible. It is literally easier to get back on track as alcoholic, as those have much smaller debts.
And it is easier to avoid keep alcohol out of house then ... cell phone put of house.
I have wondered for a while what happens to the gamblers in the city where I live. They don't end up in homeless shelters or at the soup kitchen, which has got me curious. I appreciate that the money comes to an end and debts are a result of that. However, the gamblers are not pushing it to destitution, they might lose all their big ticket stuff but they don't end up in just the clothes they wear and nothing else.
I don't think generalisations about ease of giving up alcohol versus ease of giving up sports betting (or other gambling) is an apples to apples comparison.
The chicken farmer necessarily seeks out the chickens that lay the most eggs, because that's how he makes his living. In an economy that incentivizes the highest profit-margins, this exploitation becomes intrinsic to the operation of a gambling establishment sans regulations that prevent it.
Games of chance and friendly wagers amongst friends may not, in themselves be immoral or harmful but gambling as an organized business activity is absolutely harmful
Gambling (without very strict rules) has a net negative outcome. You're not doing anything valuable, nor neutral, by gambling. So it could well be viewed as immoral.
Gambling is addictive because it gives you a dopamine rush. That’s why people gamble because it’s actually enjoyable.
I personally don’t see the argument for categorising it as immoral on the basis that’s it’s not useful. The same could be said about plenty of other enjoyable things.
However exploitation is clearly immoral. That’s where I have issue with gambling. Gambling operators don’t get rich thanks to the average users but because addicts give them much more than they should. That’s clearly immoral be it from a casino, a gambling website, or micro transactions in mobile game. Every companies which profit from that should be held accountable including Apple and Google which are clearly complicit.
> Gambling is addictive because it gives you a dopamine rush. That’s why people gamble because it’s actually enjoyable.
Cocaine also gives one pleasure when taking it, but at some point the enjoyable part is surrounding by suffering.
I agree and think cocaine should be legal.
That would allow us to better regulate it, treat addicts as they should, and end the networks currently profiteering from the flourishing black market and their exploitation of the addicts.
Prohibition just doesn’t work. We have tried dozen of times with various addictive substance from alcohol to tobacco. It’s nearly always a terrible solution.
It was more to provide an alternative to the parent's remark that it isn't. I fully agree that its exploitation is by far the greater evil.
I do not concur on the dopamine argument. There's no solid evidence for it. The underlying mechanism is probably much more complex. But since we're not discussing a signal path to addiction, it's an unnecessary complication of the argument that instills the belief that there's a medical cure.
Most Americans regard as immoral any substance or activity to which ordinary people become addicted at a significant rate.
Addiction breaks social ties. For example, when an addict starts to struggle to continue to pay for his addiction, he often starts to steal from friends and family members.
The average view on this on HN is quite different from the American average. Personality psychologists have observed that people who do well in software development and entrepreneurship tend to be high in a trait called "openness to experience". Maybe HNers are more tolerant of addictive substances and activities than the American average because addictive substances and activities tend to be interesting experiences.
(I am restricting my universe of discourse here to the US only because it is the country I know best.)
> Maybe HNers are more tolerant of addictive substances and activities than the American average because addictive substances and activities tend to be interesting experiences.
I think the more accurate lens would be that Hacker News likes money.
On the surface at least, it seems like running a gambling or sports betting company would be a dream job. You get to systemically rip off your customers through your house edge, you retain the right to back off skilled players that can bypass your house edge, your expenses go to infrastructure as opposed to creating anything of value, and you get to externalize the wider societal consequences by blaming nebulous mental illness.
"This guy wants to pay me for the privilege of gradually losing money to me, why should I stop him?"
I think this is hard to argue against because you haven't defined what you mean by strict rules, but here are some positive outcomes of gambling:
- Insurance prevents financial catastrophe by aggregating risk, yet it is nothing more than wagering you'll get into trouble.
- Market liquidity is provided by people willing to bet on price developments, which smoothes out fluctuations in availability.
- Large infrastructure projects and charity donations been financed through lotteries -- it's a way to raise money without a guarantee of return.
- If you want to sell something which a single buyer cannot afford, and it is difficult to share, it can be sold through a lottery which lets buyers buy a ticket's expected value rather than the full cost of the thing.
These benefits still exist when unregulated, but of course it seems to work even better under the appropriate regulation.
What I mean by strict rules is (but not limited to): no profit for the organizer, loss limit for everyone across all bets, etc. But I don't know what set of rules would qualify to make gambling neutral.
- Infrastructure is better off paid by taxation. That's much fairer, and more predictable.
- I don't see insurance as gambling. It has a chance element, but that's not enough to qualify something as gambling. You buy security against large losses at a moderate price (*), instead of building up large losses for nothing. It's also a step which you hope doesn't pay out (sickness, fire, theft).
- Selling through lottery is exploitation.
(*) YMMV
> taxation. That's much fairer
Extortion is more fair than voluntary contributions? Maybe on arguments from regression but it's not obvious.
> You buy security against large losses at a moderate price
Flood insurance is literally saying "I bet my house is going to be underwater" and winning the big cash price if it is.
Sure, you made an offsetting gamble when buying the house, but I don't see how you can claim a gamble is no longer a gamble when a partially offsetting gamble exists -- that's just two gambles, and indeed prudent risk management when it comes to big gambling.
> taxes are extortion
Then move to North Korea where there are no taxes.
> Flood insurance is literally saying "I bet my house is going to be underwater" and winning the big cash price if it is.
yeah the big prize of all your personal belongings being destroyed, being semi-homeless for an indefinite period of time, fighting insurance companies to get the full value of your home and all assets (glhf finding out what's secretly not covered or you can't prove you owned), searching for a new home in an inflated market, lost productivity, dead pets, etc.. What a prize! This is something you'd expect a 12 year old to try to argue.
Insurance is not legally classified as gambling for very obvious and practical reasons.
> no profit for the organizer
You’ve ruled out not just all gambling but all business. The examples the parent comment above you gave are all profit generating for the organizer.
Insurance in particular seems to be a clear societal win and is in fact gambling. You make a (relatively) small wager that pays out nothing if you don’t need it or potentially huge if you do.
We're clearly having different views on society. Yours seems through a strict financial lens, but correct me if I'm wrong.
> potentially huge if you do.
No, it isn't. You've just incurred a (probably larger) loss, elsewhere. There's no pay-off. Insurance makes large losses bearable for the individual and society. That's unlike gambling.
“I bet you $500 a month I’ll get cancer.”
Insurance absolutely has a societal benefit. It is also absolutely gambling.
The words for this are hedging and speculation vs gambling.
Amusingly speculation is generally classified differently from investment in that speculation is considered gambling.
Hedging is a strategy for reducing risk in gambling (or investment).
If you made this bet, then got cancer, would you say "hooray, I'm rich!"?
No. But not the definition of gambling.
Insurance is hedging. Aka hedging your bets.
Appeal to definitions is rarely useful in such discussions. Insurance is not a central member of the category, since people rarely get addicted to filing insurance paperwork, but people very much do get addicted to sports betting.
“Is insurance gambling” is a question of definition.
You’re trying to argue that it’s not gambling because it’s beneficial. But that’s absurd because you’re trying to define gambling as specifically “bad” in a conversation of whether gambling is bad.
You can’t argue circularly and then gripe about clarifying definitions.
No, nobody's trying to argue that gambling is by definition bad – that is to say, nobody's defining the category boundaries of "gambling" contingent on possessing the property "is bad". Some people have constrained the definition of "gambling" such that it only contains things they view as bad, and then observed that all the things they consider "gambling" are bad, but that's not the vacuous, circular claim you make it out to be.
In lieu of re-quoting other parts of the thread, I'll instead ask you to please re-read the arguments people have made, more slowly.
Reread your own message.
> Some people have constrained the definition of "gambling" such that it only contains things they view as bad
If there is some internally consistent definition that excludes all the “good” stuff without excluding it specifically for being good, no one has shared that so far as I’ve seen.
The arguments about insurance so far have been “but it’s a good thing” and “you aren’t happy when your insurance pays out”. The former is exactly gambling==bad and the latter is just wrong. I could bet that a politician I despise will win and I won’t necessarily be happy that I won. I’ll be more happy that I got a payout than not, exactly the same as insurance. That’s what a hedge is.
Insurances are not hedges. Hedges are „investment position[s] intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment“ (wikipedia) of which insurances can be a part of, while in an insurance „a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury“ (wikipedia).
Absolutely not the same thing. But even so there is still an interesting insight to be gained from common parlance:
Usually we talk of a bet in a situation where you take an event that is somewhat out of your control and irrelevant for your wellbeing and intentionally and actively make some kind of material outcome for yourself depend on it. In so far speculation at stock markets is „gambly“, you are right about that. And if you have measures in place that hedge the risks of those speculations you might be tempted to very loosely call those your insurance.
If you look however at how the term insurance is typically used you can see a difference there: you insure against risks that are non-avoidable risks of your daily life or business. You do not intentionally and actively enter the cancer-lottery. And you do not actively take measures to win your „health-insurance-bet“ because the outcome is still considered catastrophic, even in case of „winning“ it.
And the way people tend to see things more as insurance vs. bets follows exactly these lines: is it about mitigating a devastating natural risk that is hard or impossible to avoid 100% or is it about something where you actively and intentionally attach your wellbeing to a random event. (We could separate this out in two questions: do you involve yourself actively and intentionally; and: is the outcome that you bet on inherently against your intrinsic interests. But that is a detail that I don‘t think we need to go into)
I think this explains the common parlance quite well: health-insurance: the risk is unavoidable, you do not willfully enter some kind of cancer-lottery on whose outcome you bet. Also you have an intrinsic interest in not „winning“ said „cancer-lottery“. -> no doubt it is insurance.
Legal expenses insurance: risks depend largely on your behaviour but you usually still have an intrinsic interest not having to use it. -> some people might see this as more gambling- or “bet-“ adjacent.
Speculating on one stock and hedging that bet. -> Totally not an insurance. Also not something insurances do. An insurance might be part of your hedge (maybe insurance of freight against loss) but insurers typically do not insure bets. Which makes sense, since part of their business-model is that the customer has an intrinsic interest that the payout case does not occur.
This whole thread started because someone essentially said “gambling is bad” and someone else said “not all gambling is bad; how about X, Y, and Z?” My point here is that if you sit down and define what gambling is in a principled and consistent way, you probably have to conclude that some good things are actually gambling. And that’s cool, because we can also then discuss what kinds of things that “maybe look like gambling” are actually a net positive vs net negative based on their impact rather than some division of “gambling” vs “not gambling” that is fairly arbitrary and leads to bias in how we think of them. You can’t have that kind of conversation if the definition of gambling includes “and it’s bad” because it’s tautological.
In specific response to your reply, I understand what you’re going for but you’re stretching definitions to meet your goals. The Wikipedia page you cite states clearly that insurance is a common hedge. And in your definition of a bet you state that it is “irrelevant for your wellbeing” as if a boxer wagers on their own fight wouldn’t be betting or gambling.
Your discussion of insurance vs bets is reasonable and I get what you’re going for, but I think the distinction is not as clear as it might seem at first. “I don’t want this payout” feels like a meaningful distinction but that Wikipedia page rears its ugly head and points out Hawking’s what-if-black-holes-aren’t-real bet that he wanted to lose. I wanted the Seahawks to win today. If I had put $50 on the Buccaneers would that have been a bet? Insurance? A hedge?
Regardless, back to my point. Maybe there is some criteria that disambiguates all the “good Things that look like gambling but aren’t” from the “bad things that are clearly gambling” but I haven’t seen it yet. I think it’s all some level of gambling. If I roll through life without health insurance, I’m betting I don’t need it. If I buy the insurance I’m betting that at some point I will, or at least that the odds are good enough that I will that I should hedge.
Insurance is moral stewardship, and not unearned gain. In fact, refusing insurance when your neighbors are of the same religion is seen as gambling.
You don’t earn a payout for cancer treatment. It is definitely unearned.
If you paid into the insurance pool, then how is the pay out unearned?
Did you choose to get cancer or fake it?
Paying into insurance does not earn a payout any more than paying into the lottery earns a payout. The payout is determined by random chance.
Selling a product or service to its addicts is immoral. Consumption isn't, its just stupid
> Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing.
This is a neat moral message… but is it really true? Gambling is addictive, so the reality might be that even without such deep social problems you get similar levels
Brenner, Brenner, and Brown wrote A World of Chance in which they draw from large reams of data and conclude that gambling is often used by those that see no other way up.
It can be a bit of both no? Drugs are addictive but drug use increases when conditions worsen.
Gambling is addictive for some, in the same way that alcohol is addictive for some, yet blanket alcohol prohibition is not considered a great idea in hindsight.
I don't know how we could put limits on gambling that would make sense, though. There's a huge difference in bets that I used to make (which were all black-market sports bets, usually on 'game winner' or over/under) ~ once a week during the NFL season vs. the shit going on with FanDuel and all these phone-based gamified services. And that stuff absolutely encourages you to make bets that you can't afford and can easily turn into a problem even for someone who isn't 'addicted' per se -- it's like the predatory loot box model from video games.
TLDR I don't know how you write a law that would put hard and fast limits on what can be bet on and how much an individual is allowed to bet during a week in a way that would be palatable to the companies. I'm in favor of the blanket ban at this point; the black market for betting has always existed and it was better than the current setup.
I think banning or severely limiting advertising similar to cigarettes would be a good start. Stop having sports broadcasts be so intertwined with gambling, seeing odds on the screen when watching sports is gross.
You could make it so that if someone called the gambling hotline then they automatically are suspended from betting at all sports books for a year or something. Idk if this is the perfect policy but it took me about 5 minutes to come up with it.
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 think what you're saying is that society would benefit from a kind of lottery system that made it easy for people to earn a sizable amount of money randomly, without any sort of gatekeeping?
I agree with the premise, however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
it's not really lottery, that system has to involve growing a 'skill' such that one could possibly get 'good' and 'rewarded' at it, and that 'skill' doesn't need human approval, which will make it a true alternative to getting jobs. bonus points if one can scale it up.
Take daytrading for example, of the 99% who fail are they all gamblers or are they just tolerating enough failures until they get a positive expectancy?
> however, in actuality gambling systems are almost all designed to just extract money from people. Not function as a wealth redistribution system.
Yea what I'm talking about isn't exactly a gambling system which will try to screw you over the instant you get some momentum of out a positive expectancy system.
Maybe playing sports is the closest?
Doesn’t the House very effectively gatekeep sharps from the table?
yea what i'm talking about excludes the house banning people from playing their game.
> 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.
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.
You are so wildly off base from my lived experience that I have to assume you have no experience with generational poverty.
You are not saving up to improve your life because the savings rate is too small to effectively matter. And all the savings you muster can be wiped out by, well, any extra expense. Car breaks down, medical copay, kid needs clothes due to a growth spurt, bank fees, etc.
If any chance event will break you, it is not entirely illogical to lean on chance to save you.
If you don't see light at the end of the tunnel, or you think that light is an oncoming train, you are not going to "act rationally" for arriving at the end of the tunnel.
Yes. Of all people, Jordan Peterson used to talk about this a lot. He said anybody will break from enough cycles of hard work with no reward, and that's when people do stupid things. The nickel and diming of everything alone is enough to drive a person insane if they don't make enough money to ignore it.
So very true, homie: Why didn't all the gambling addicts put their money into a Vanguard account instead? Are they stupid?
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.
> 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.
This seems to be pretty clearly saying that you think poor people only gamble with money they don't need and if they didn't gamble they would be able to stop being poor by investing that money. That seems a pretty clear statement that you think that poor people who gamble wouldn't be poor if they didn't irrationally gamble money that they should have invested in their future.
You say you have a "better grasp" of your opinion. I say you don't have a good enough grasp of it to present it in an understandable way since this "misinterpretation" of your view seems to match pretty well with what you've actually said.
Well that is progress because now you're attributing something to me that is close to what I do believe, which is poor people who gamble probably are poor because they make terrible financial decisions. I mean, you linked an article earlier suggesting that there are people who spend more than 5% of their income on lotto tickets [0]. No mystery why they're poor, they make bad decisions with money. In percentage terms, 25% of income in savings is probably the magic line where suddenly the whole thing becomes financially self-sustaining. 5% is not an inconsiderable chunk of that. Someone who just donates that sort of chunk to a gambling company is not competent with money.
But that isn't "poor people", and it isn't reasonable to just assume that poor people are all incapable. Most are perfectly reasonable people who happen to be poor despite generally being responsible with what money they do have. And presumably not throwing away 5% of their income for no good reason. I suppose I might be over-estimating poor people, but that isn't any reason for you to start misrepresenting my beliefs.
> I say you don't have a good enough grasp of it to present it in an understandable way since this "misinterpretation" of your view seems to match pretty well with what you've actually said.
Bullshit. You claimed my opinion was "poor people are poor because they're irrational". That is both a ridiculous statement and a gross mischaracterisation of what I said. Realistically I probably should get an apology, although getting you to understand what I actually wrote is enough for me.
[0] If you read the article closely though, that isn't actually mathematically guaranteed. Means can be deceptive like that.
I think you’re establishing a false dichotomy. By and large, poor people are poor because they’re irrational. The businesses that prey on poor people—shady used car dealers, payday lenders, bookies—are exploiting this very irrationality. If we lived in a society where everybody was competent and responsible, none of these businesses could survive.
Alas, human beings sometimes have imperfections that leave them vulnerable to these predatory businesses. What’s more, the very irrationality of patronizing these businesses obviates any objection to restricting consumer freedoms by prohibiting and regulating these businesses.
That take feels lazy. Poverty isn’t primarily about irrationality, it’s about constraints. People make decisions that are locally rational given their options, but the system they’re operating in is tilted against them.
If rent eats half your income and your car breaks down, you’re not choosing between “investing” and “consuming.” You’re choosing between keeping your job and getting evicted. Behavioral quirks exist, sure, but they’re downstream of scarcity, and scarcity itself warps decision-making.
We’ve got decades of data showing that when you remove the constant pressure (through cash transfers, healthcare, childcare, etc.), people generally make long-term, rational decisions. The idea that “the poor are poor because they’re irrational” mistakes the symptom for the cause.
It is propaganda to "other" the poor. It is much easier to blame irrationality for people being poor rather than the systems we choose to keep in place. Those who convinced you of this falsehood, what are they gaining?
People aren't helpless pawns and they aren't perfect either. There's variability in the human ability to make rational economic decisions, isn't there? So what do you imagine happens if someone routinely makes bad economic decisions?
I don't think this explains 100% of why poor people are poor, but it doesn't explain 0% of it either. And to bring it back to the original point, we need to recognize that certain economic decisions, like sports gambling, are virtually always irrational decisions, and there's virtually nothing to be gained by protecting the consumer's freedom to make those decisions.
You seem to have a load-bearing assumption that in order to care about the poor, we can't even entertain the notion that any of them could ever possibly have become poor as a consequence of their own imperfections. Why is that? It seems obvious to me that when people end up poorer as a consequence of their gambling addictions, the obvious solution is to prohibit or at least more strictly regulate gambling, not to just leave those people to their fate.
> It is propaganda to "other" the poor. It is much easier to blame irrationality for people being poor rather than the systems we choose to keep in place. Those who convinced you of this falsehood, what are they gaining?
That take feels lazy and a little bit like projection. I'm not "othering" the poor, I'm trying to understand at least one of the problems they face and what solutions are possible. And one of "the systems we choose to keep in place" is this recent innovation of allowing online gambling to proliferate and freely advertise on every platform, which directly contributes to gambling addictions, which can and do ruin people's lives. Who stands to gain? The bookies. Yet you're the one arguing that the addict who blows his kids' college fund betting on football is "making decisions that are locally rational given their options", and I'm the one arguing that we should make it harder for the gambling industry to exploit him.
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.
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 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 you're banning Las Vegas, and even if that's the right thing to do, we don't have a ton of precedent for doing that much harm to corporate bottom lines. It took 50 years of incontrovertible evidence to do it to tobacco. It'll probably happen eventually, but in the same way. We won't outright ban betting, but it will be heavily marketed against, socially stigmatized, and banned from advertising.
> It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better.
I think this passes the buck. It's not the addictive apps and ads, it's society! Don't regulate us!
Yeah I tend to agree with this. People have always bet on sports. Wodehouse wrote a story about bored rich guys in the countryside betting on children’s church games. The real question is, what has changed to allow this betting to occur legally?
It is possible to see both systemic and individual concerns. Binary thinking for blame or credit rarely makes sense in complex systems.
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.
I disagree. What a high level professional gambler is doing is hard work.
Hard work doesn't make you rich, but it's part of the things that you need to prosper. I'm no inspirational poster child, but hard work, building a network, doing good things for people were all essential to my long term success. I didn't have the benefit of familial connections, but that helps too. There's a saying that you make your own luck, which is true... if you're not on the field, you can't get lucky.
People making a living playing poker is fine, but it's just like being a working musician, an investor or an athlete. I had a friend who made a living on horse better. You've developed a set of skills and have a usually limited window to cash in on them. The 95% of people gambling aren't attracted to the game of skill, and flop around with the 101 things to do in a gambling establishment that aren't poker.
I agree that hard work is often a pre-requisite for being successful, but it is not key to being successful by any means. Like I wouldn't agree with your definition because most people wouldn't claim that, say, getting into bitcoin early and then working like 10 hours a week max trading and setting up mining rigs is "hard work," even if it made some people extremely wealthy, just because they got on the trend early.
That’s fair, you make a good point.
I guess people win the lottery too. Life is complex, there’s no one answer. And tbh, if I reflect on my own life, my comp is much higher than it has ever been, my peeps are very happy, and I’m not grinding by any means.
People who win the lottery often can't turn that money into a reliable investment vehicle. Like, if I won the lottery, I would probably become a VC or start building GPU farms. But that would probably still take a lot of work; I'm just saying some people have found a way to maintain wealth long term without doing a considerable amount of work.
Bingo!
Pun intended.
Ah yes, gambling, a thing that has never before been popular.
Gambling was already very popular, but since the lockdown, the industry has grown exponentially. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391887687_The_Strat... - the research contains figures and forecasts for the next few years - and they’re quite impressive
Better said: people are lazy and would rather the quick buck than hard work
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.
I think casinos do the same thing..
> you might as well throw your money at something that has the possibility of making your rich
I don't think anyone is getting rich from sports betting. It's not like the lottery, where the jackpots are massive and the odds are very long. And the jackpots get massive in the lottery because they accumulate when nobody wins, whereas in sports bettings, the gambler always either wins or loses, based on the outcome of the sporting event; there's no carry-over.
You are right customers are not getting rich from sports betting, but the true reason is that once 'the house', the betting company sees a consistent winner, it will ban them or lower their betting limit to discourage them from betting again. There are people that would get rich otherwise. Also betting companies are coordinating their odds to prevent arbitrage.
And also, of course: there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich. And betting company owners too. But you didn't mean those.
> There are people that would get rich otherwise.
This is highly unlikely. Nobody has the magical ability to predict the outcome of sporting events.
> there are gangs influencing the outcomes of the sport events and selling the bets or organizing betting on them. Fraudster bosses, if they are smart, are absolutely getting rich.
This is highly unlikely for most of the things that Americans are gambling on, such as NFL games.
> But you didn't mean those.
It doesn't appear to be what the OP meant.
I was quite interested in one of the CEOs from a premier league team who runs StarLizard which is a private gambling syndicate focused on sports. They're making a lot of money off building models to predict sport outcomes.
I'm not sure if you'd discount that as obviously thats completely different than 1 person sitting in their bedroom placing bets but just thought I'd raise it incase this level of sports betting interests you.
From what I understand they place their bets in Asian markets rather than the markets consumers in the west would.
> This is highly unlikely.
It is my experience from working in the sports betting industry for several years, including the risk reporting and risk managing part. In fact I'm pretty sure several people lived comfortable life by going around our risk management by using a loophole that was possible at the time in our country - it was possible to bet anonymously in person. So while we could limit maximum winnings per bet, we could not tie particular bets to persons, and they just placed several bets in different locations, or they used helpers.
I'm not going into speculations how they acquired the knowledge. Some people are just nerds, others sit at the stadiums and place bets right from there etc., but I'm pretty confident there are customers who are able to make money on sport bets and are not fraudsters.
> several people lived comfortable life
> in our country
A comfortable life in which country?
And "several" means "more than two but not many".
> they used helpers
So, this doesn't sound like just ordinary people who have lost hope.
The thing about lottery tickets, as opposed to sports betting is that the lottery requires zero skill. You buy a ticket, and if you get lucky and your numbers are randomly chosen, you win. Anyone can hope to win the lottery. But becoming a professional sports gambler, or a professional poker player, for example, is not really the usual response to losing hope.
> A comfortable life in which country?
Not that important, if you are able to win 150k USD/EUR a bet several times in a year.
> So, this doesn't sound like just ordinary people who have lost hope.
Not sure where the 'hope' got in, but in our country ordinary people are perfectly able to enter a bar and ask patrons to place a bet in exchange for a beer and a vodka. In fact the bar and the betting shop are often the same place.
> But becoming a professional sports gambler, or a professional poker player, for example, is not really the usual response to losing hope.
It's not the usual response but there is a sort of people who do this. They will not work 9-5 a stable good paying job although they are able to, but absolutely will put huge effort into finding a way to make money any other way.
> Not sure where the 'hope' got in
That's where this discussion started! From the OP: "It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better."
You've taken the discussion off on a tangent that's mostly unrelated to the original point that I was addressing.
Well I hope the reader now understands that it is sometimes possible to make money by betting.
> > It’s reflective of people losing hope in the system’s ability to make their lives better
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
> On the contrary all epicenters of gambling are extremely rich areas populated by people who have mastered such art.
This does not seem to be a rebuttal. The “extremely rich areas” are generally funded by the not at all rich who lose their money gambling.
Additionally most in the “extremely rich areas” are not actually wealthy. And there are many, many gambling areas that are not rich at all.
Stock exchanges are not themselves anything like a casino. You can bet within them in similar ways, but you can also make bets at a stock exchange that you would never find at a casino.
The immoral part is the grifters, not the suckers.
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.
Know many countries with a political entiry known as "The GOP" that likes to blame minorities for everything wrong in society?
Pretty much any country. If you have $1m in assets you can simply stick it in a passive fund and earn more than the average wage in the highest earning countries. You can certainly live like a king in low cost countries.
You’re either using nominal, not real, returns, or assuming that passive fund is taking on a lot of risk/recency bias.
If you had said $2 million, I’d say that’s closer to accurate, although there’s still a conversation to be had about risk vs return.
Over the last 30 years the s&p with reinvested dividends has returned an average 9%, so fine, $90k off $1m assets.
Median wage in the USA is globally very high at just over $60k.
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.
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
There are many ways to use the financial markets that are not gambling. Buying an index fund or Coca-Cola isn’t gambling; it is not even very risky. Nor are individual stocks gambling, as you can get a reasonable idea of what a company’s price ought to be and how it is likely to perform in the future, at least for well-established companies. It’s also harder to get into debt, as long as you don’t short, because you can only spend money you have, and the stock does not become worthless if your analysis is wrong. (At least, there are warning signs)
Now day-trading? I consider that gambling, because any particular day’s price movement is a lot closer to random.
Buying a stock or mutual fund is the very definition of gambling: placing a monetary bet on an unknown future event. Just because this activity has historically had a +EV, doesn't make it any less gambling.
Purchasing a business or parts thereof is not “gambling” any more than purchasing a house is “gambling”. People purchase them (or are supposed to) for the value they provide either through income or asset appreciation in the case of businesses or shelter in the case of the house and not for the singular promise of some winning outcome unlike games of chance. The only expectation is that the asset purchased will continue to provide value throughout the period of ownership which is no more or less than what you would expect of many other assets or goods you might purchase and none of this is contingent on mere chance alone. Just because somebody quotes a ridiculously high or low price does not necessarily mean the intrinsic value of the asset has changed. Overpaying for an asset is not the same as losing money to a slot machine. Have I “lost money gambling” if I buy something in a store the day before it gets discounted? These are just risks that exist in any market. Do not confuse this issue just because some have decided to use them as mere vehicles for price speculation. People speculate on the price of eggs, oil and gold as well but that does not mean buying eggs for breakfast, fuel for your car or a gold necklace for your wife is “gambling”.
By this definition prime loans are also gambling. When you bet on something risky then you are gambling. When you bet on something not risky you are not gambling. Also consider that not investing will generally lose money over time due to things like inflation. If we define the goal to be holding as much value as we can, holding dollars is more risky than investing in many stocks (or bonds, which also have a risk of defaulting). A better definition of gambling is something like "taking unnecessary and unproductive risks."
I'm not sure I buy any definition of gambling that depends on the outcome. If you lose money or tend to lose money, then it's gambling, but if you win money or tend to win money, then we change the name to "investing?" Risk includes upside and downside risk.
It doesn't depend on the outcome. If a bank only does prime loans and spreads out it's loans multiple borrowers, has a good reserve ratio etc. and still loses it all, that still wasn't gambling. This is more clear if you consider that storing value in money is also risky. When you get paid in a currency, you automatically begin investing in it at the same time. This is even more clear with foreign currencies. If you got paid $1 million in Turkish Lyra and do not store that value somewhere else, that is more gambling-like than putting it in the S&P. I guess you can say that any time you increase the amount of risk in an investment to get more reward you are gambling. But you can invest in something other than USD with the same risk but with greater reward. For example you can invest it in US bonds (over multiple issues) which has a similar risk to the USD but a greater reward. Still, under such a definition, any business is gambling. We can accept that, but then we have no word that differentiates owning a grocery store from betting all your money on a coin flip, so then the word "gambling" becomes much less useful or really useless in my opinion.
Is it gambling if it has a +EV?
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.
> bet the better off do gamble on the financial markets though
Much less. Something I’ve noticed is the parents of the wealthy teaching their children to invest versus e.g. day trade. In middle class or poor households, on the other hand, it’s not uncommon for the kid to be trading crypto instead.
Financial markets produce a net positive outcome for investors (gamblers), no? The average rate of return in the S&P500 is about 10% and it's considered the baseline for thr stock market.
The gambling equivalent is day trading, not holding VOO for a decade.
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.
> Investing is putting money into (hopefully) productive use, like a company with revenue, in an expectation of a return
The big differences are time horizon, addiction and expectations.
The longer the term, the less actively one must watch it and the lower the expected returns, the more likely it’s investing. The shorter the expected turnaround, the more closely one watches numbers go up and down, and the more one is focused on turning multiples than yields, the more likely it’s gambling.
Any stochastic process can produce gambling behaviour. Only a positive-sum game can facilitate investing.
When you buy a stock, you're not contributing it to the company's productive use. If I buy $1000 of MSFT, Microsoft doesn't get an extra $1000 in their bank account to invest in their business. That $1000 is going to another bettor to settle his previous bet, and at some point in the future, I'll sell and get an unknown amount of money to settle my bet. Just because historically betting on the stock market has been +EV doesn't mean it's not still gambling.
If you buy MSFT specifically you'll get regular, fairly predictable dividend payments and not just an unknown amount of money in the future.
MSFT goes up a tiny fraction when you buy. That means MSFT employees with stock grants get a tiny "raise" courtesy of you and with no cost to the company. Microsoft can also use their more expensive stock to make acquisitions. So you are contributing to the company's productive use in at least 2 ways if you buy its stock.
Buying MSFT doesn't meet the criteria to be called gambling, for me.
> When you buy a stock, you're not contributing it to the company's productive use
You are marginally reducing their cost of capital.
Sure, but that's pretty indirect and a far cry from "putting the money to productive use." Unless you're an early investor or IPO participant, your actual money is not being directly put to productive use by the company you are "investing" in.
> that's pretty indirect and a far cry from "putting the money to productive use."
All finance is indirect. Particularly at small scale.
> Unless you're an early investor or IPO participant
Plenty of IPOs are entirely secondary. And public companies regularly raise money via at-the-market offerings, where a random trader may wind up cutting a cheque to the corporate treasury. (I’ve been a seed investor and IPO investor. My effects on the outcome were rarely singularly meaningful.)
In a large offering, a small IPO investor has about as much direct effect on the outcome as someone buying the pop publicly. In aggregate, however, their actions are meaningful and productive.
Put another way: contrast two economies, one in which most capital is tied up sports gambling (negative-sum game), the other in which it’s in equities (positive-sum long term), one will outperform the other.
Early investors and IPO participants put their money in expecting that 20 years later you would buy the stock off their hands. It feels weird to call it causation when it's traveling back in time, but in a way buying the stock contributes to investment.
The difference is investing has a positive expected return. Betting against the house does not.
> investing has a positive expected return
Can you tell me more about this. I've never heard of it before. Is there a theorem?
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.
> The only Safeway in my city that doesn’t sell lottery tickets is the one in the most affluent neighborhood.
Does the affluent community prohibit it or is Safeway self-policing?
I'd wager (heh) a bit of both. The distinction isn't that the affluent neighborhood gets to make its own decisions or be cared about by large corporations whose presence ostensibly enhances their quality of life, it's that poor neighborhoods don't. The reason the latter have these socioeconomically deleterious establishments is the same reason they don't get grocery stores or gyms: the people making the decisions don't see them as customers to serve, but as marks to exploit. And suddenly we're back to the notion that privilege isn't necessarily having it "better," but sometimes just having what most would consider the dignified standard.
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.
That doesn't feel like a very apt analogy. Poor vision or dyslexia can't easily be hijacked into a cycle of addiction the way poor impulse control can. Making a bit of money helping someone with poor vision is very different than blasting advertisements on every single medium and using predatory practices to draw in those with poor impulse control. Not to mention the continued exploitation afterwards until the victim has nothing left.
Making money helping people with poor vision (selling glasses) is fine, of course. I mean exploiting their weaknesses, like using a tiny typeface to write important price information while showing a big price-like number prominently. Doing something formally correct which turns into a trap because of the customer's disability.
I also left my home country about a decade ago.
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 also left my country years ago and come back once or twice a year. This year the city hall introduced a new parking app that can't be installed on a phone with an app store registered outside Romania, because the freaking parking app has a gambling section and they decided to go with gambling instead of supporting a universal parking app (like the previous one that they had) available also for tourists from outside the country. I called them out on that and said that they can't make it available outside the country because of legal issues with the gambling section....
Aren't betting houses antiquated now? I assumed even senior citizen would be betting through their phones.
Being able to gamble privately, 24/7, with all the psychological/engagement "optimizations" is even more insidious.
Romania?
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.
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.
There are some differences: investment platforms wont kick you out if you manage to earn money. Gambling sites do that. If you are loosing a lot, gaming sites make your limits go up. If you are winning a lot, your limits go down. Investment sites dont do that.
They also assign "consigliere" to you if you loose a lot. He is supposed to create a personal relationship with you. If you try to stop playing, that person will try to get you back into gaming.
You are not betting against investment platform itself, you are betring against other people on it. That is major difference.
Yeah, the incentives are completely different between exchanges and bookmakers. Exchanges make money regardless of who wins or loses. Bookmakers make money from their users losing.
> 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.
I worked for a gambling syndicate. We often made money from bad initial prices. Many bookies tolerated us because they wanted to know what we thought was mispriced and rapidly adjusted their odds after we started betting.
It was a balancing act though. They really wanted to know what we were doing, but didn’t want to lose too much to us. So there was some give and take / bartering around the fair value of our information in the form of our accounts being banned and limited or bets being voided. But they definitely didn’t want to eradicate us.
> 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.
The vast majority of small bookmakers in the UK don't come up with their own prices. They either copy other bookmakers or pay for them.
They also typically use off the shelf software for book management and risk.
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.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45483917 , sidethread.
Thanks! I definitely have more to learn in this area.
I have worked in the betting industry for several years. And the reason I'm writing is to tell you that while (2) sound logical, it was not used during my time in the industry. Or to be more precise, of course the odds are adjusted all the time to balance the market, prevent arbitrage etc, but it was also very common to have a 'loss leader bet', usually on the favourite, where the betting company would take a loss or make very little money if the favourite wins (but if that happens the customers still don't make a lot, because the odds are already low, and betting on a favourite is not a winning strategy because the real fav loss probability is higher than the odds would suggest). OTOH what is also often done is when 'real odds' are very high (low probability), the odds that are offered are way lower than the probability would suggest. So if 'real odds' are 100:1, the company would offer 50:1, so, even taking into account the company margins, you as a customers are never offered anything close to the real probability and as a consequence unless you are exceptionally good can never make money (and if you do your are banned).
I addressed this in my original comment. What, exactly and explicitly, is your point?
> 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.
Two word refutation: Passive smoking.
I’m sure there is an argument there somewhere, and I’d love to address that if you would care to give it another go.
> 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.
It is your right as a human to waste your life away. It is also by definition immoral regardless of moral system (so long as 'waste your life away' is an accurate assessment within said moral system), but they are completely separate matters.
I.e., no. It counts for nothing.
Did you miss the point about negative impact on others?
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.
It absolutely does account for that. Your entire comment is a strawman.
If that is not intentional (which I suspect it is not, so no offense intended), then I believe a quick search on “God-given rights” should help you make whatever case you want to in a logically consistent manner. It is a well-defined concept that has a specific meaning over a specific domain. I get the feeling “negative rights vs. positive rights” might be a useful search phrase as well.
The Judeo-Christian god does not exist, nor any other god, so I'm not sure what rights you're referring to. Are you referring to human rights? We don't need a religion to justify those.
Anyway, you said your argument accounts for it, but didn't actually follow through and demonstrate why that is. How does your argument take into account the aforementioned power imbalances?
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 asked because I noticed this strange cluster (for me) of people which want to ban some things like gambling or social media algorithms because they are exploitative and addictive, but who also want to legalize drugs. I had a feeling you might be in it.
Stranger, some of them want to ban/make it harder to distribute drugs "legally" through doctors (OxyContin, Sackler family scandal) because doctors might be monetarily incentivized, but then they also support complete drug legalization, including for the same drugs (fentanyl). This position is not even internally consistent, in this case fentanyl was "legalized" close to what they seem to demand, just gated by a doctor.
I don't have a clear position, but I don't think I would support legalization of "hard" drugs (anything above marijuana/MDMA). I can't see any positive, the negatives are clear, and it impacts the whole society (I will respect your freedom until it impinges on mine).
I am pro 2nd amendment, but I also believe the State should maintain it's monopoly on violence. Otherwise it's Mad Max world. The way the 2nd amendment is stated (prevent tirany) would not work anyway today, the military power of the State is vastly larger, the "militias" will never stand a chance against Police/Army/Cyber/... So I am pro guns just as far as personal protection requires (so no rocket launchers).
I was reading this chain of responses. They are great. The two of you are very thoughtful in your world view.
About your last paragraph: How do you feel about other OECD (highly developed) countries that do not allow personal gun ownership (except for hunting and sport shooting (clays, etc.)? Take Japan for example: Except for hunting and sport shooting, ownership of guns is not allowed. How do you feel about it?
If there are no guns around, and if the Police is competent, I would be against allowing guns.
But the police must do it's job. Take Sweden, criminality is now rampant there, criminals are using grenades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grenade_attacks_in_Swe...
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.
Well, advertising as a concept is fine, but the industry is steeped in advanced, refined yet old-as-time-itself psychological manipulation tactics.
When addiction is intentionally engineered at a high level and wrapped in the Trojan horse of self-sufficiency or emotion, deceit, or the power of suggestion, we have a problem. Imagine Taylor Swift doing an ad for crack cocaine.
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.
Right. In other words, no one's God-given, negative rights are being infringed upon.
Rights are merely a simplification of complex interactions. Societies are more focused on what benefits themselves than such simplification.
The minimal effectiveness of enhanced interrogation plus the desire of the population not to risk being so interrogated means people are generally apposed to such. Tracking down a nuclear threat is considered something of an exception to this stance by the average person.
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...
Hanging out at the same restaurant is a terrible idea for a watch thief, you will be caught over time.
That’s not an issue for the loan shark.
By customers you mean "people to sell stolen watches to"? Cause if that is the question, neither of these is a good place. Affluent people wont buy obviously stolen watches directly in the restaurant, they will go through middleman that makes them look legit.
And people being there to bet wont be buying watches that much either.
Being somewhat skilled does not make it not hazard. And practices of books are purely predatory.
Irrelevant. I only bring up the stochastic element because of the implicit argument that people are being victimized by gambling against their will.
Since you would be extremely off-topic if you tried to extend this argument to, e.g., Daniel Negreanu engaging in a game of poker, I wanted to explicitly preclude individuals competently engaging in whatever activity is being deemed 'problematic.'
It was mostly to help the 'other side' stay on topic; otherwise, I could trivially refute their arguments by counterexamples, e.g., Daniel Negreanu.
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.
Once you left Nevada, I doubt you saw the same thing. If I want to see a slot machine in Washington, I have to go to a casino on a native reservation.
I'm in the Midwest. They say "for amusement only" but they all pay out.
That is very much state by state in the usa. My state never had slots in gas stations or bars.
This sounds like Nevada. I remember arriving in the Reno airport for the first time and being astounded that there were so many slot machines around. Even CVS had slot machines!
Nope, Midwest.
It's wild, first thing you encounter when you come off the plane is just rows and rows of slot machines. Jarring
Scale.
> 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.
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).
You wrote:
Did you read this part? In short, I would say "scale matters".Losing or winning a pint or two once or twice a week isn't the end of the world. The pools involved putting numbers into coupons and sending them off each week, it cost you £2 or whatever, and that was it for the week.
Modern sports betting seems (to my untrained uninterested eye) to be about extracting multiple bets of £20+ an hour, seemingly competing with the coke dealers which is apparently a very common part of football nowadays for the income, and using similar tactics.
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.
> weed, for example, is inherently addictive, gambling is not
Any science on this? That’s a wild statement vs my priors.
Yes it existed before. But Do you dispute that far more people in the US are participating now?
Ease of access and advertising matter.
> Legalization allows you to generate tax revenue and implement harm prevention effectively for the very small amount of users that are gambling addicts
You do not need legalization for harm reduction. But, the state earning on gambling means effective regulations will be against state interests.
Gambling earns mostly on addicts. Not on people who bet a little here and there. By extension, state will need those addicts existing and loosing money to get taxes too.
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
Kids are the majority of people I know who bet a lot. Mostly teenagers on the ski lifts talking about parlays and long shots.
> 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.
> Perhaps ban advertising
Yes. Ban the phone apps and had the ads. Advertising works people, that’s why they pay for it!
>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.
> If someone is a gambling addict, they are going to do it
Gambling marketing, and the gambling industry, facilitate the production of gambling addicts.
> 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.
> 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.
Net loss means that if you add all the players together, the losses exceed the winnings.
Yes some individuals win (at least occasionally.) But as a group it's always a net loss (because the house takes a cut.)
The statement "in all forms of gambling the gamblers make a net loss" is ambiguous as to whether it's the gamblers as a whole or each of the gamblers making a net loss, and while I grant that it reads more like the way you're describing, the later context pushes the intended meaning in the other direction.
He says "The 'house' is the only winner," which is as a point of fact untrue - there are also individual gamblers who are winners. Saying this implies he thinks that each of the gamblers is a net loser.
I'm imagining mandatory disclosures like on cigarette packs, except it's some distribution chart or percentile figure for bankruptcy.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
This very much varies state-by-state (ignoring prenups and emergency med treatment as edge cases). In my marriage and state (FL) debts incurred by me remain my own. Wifey owes none of it. Compare with states that have community property or purchases made as tenants by the entirety.
I remember when gambling was actually just illegal in most of the USA.
In my state, it was the state run lotto that was used to sell the idea "Hey we'll take lottery proceeds and fund education with it!!!!!". Of course, state-run lottery was legalized, and yes, the proceeds did run schools.
The next funding session, they CUT the existing funding to schools and had the lottery run the bulk of the funding. They naturally never said that part out loud.
And riverboat gambling was a quazi-legal thing. Then casinos were legalized. Then normalized gambling everywhere. Even the local groceries have state-run lotto vending machines that gobble 20's and 50's for a chance to strike it rich, or more likely, get poorer.
I prefer when gambling was decriminalized individually, but not endorsed for the state or companies to run. I also don't want cop squads cracking down on the penny or quarter games in peoples' houses.
I honestly think we had a pretty good middle ground with people having to go to Vegas/Reno/AC to gamble. It can be fun, but you have to go out of your way to do it. If you have a fun Vegas weekend and blow a bunch of money once in a while, that seems pretty okay relative to being able to constantly bet on anything from your phone.
Sounds like Illinois
Indiana, but yeah, close for sure.
I think it was Illinois' state lotto that encouraged Indiana to also unrestrict it initially for government based gambling ($1 scratchoffs and weekly lotto drawing). Pretty sure they also did the "school budget scam" by transferring tax proceeds from the lotto instead of adding it as well.
Again, though, news in the 1980's didnt have as much traveling power, unless it showed up in the NY Times or other national level papers. And the local papers actuually did local news then.
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.
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...
You can also see it as the more we let corporations bend and break the rules of our society the more we will see the monetization of things that harm us directly for some small group's material gain.
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...
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.
NCAA women's sports too.
These young women don't have the money to hire security and are especially vulnerable as a result
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.
I've seen gambling destroying more lives than alcohol in my lifetime. And I live in the area which is rather on top of the world by alcohol consumption per capita.
Just wait how outraged they will be when they learn of this thing called the stock market.
I'm surprised at the lack of mentioning the effects of gambling on the thing being gambled on!
Sure gambling will always happen wherever there's something with uncertainty. But to make it fully legal opens the doors wide open for growth, leading to the only possible outcome of "more money being bet". I think it would be naive to assume that the integrity of any sport stays stable when such a large amount of money is staked on it.
Sports gambling is perverting sports. When ESPN has special segments on good bets you know we have lost our way.
I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically awful about sports betting. I do think that the way American corporations have set it up, though, has made it a lot more predatory than many fans want to admit.
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.
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.
The author approaches the topic from a libertarian perspective with some prior beliefs about the futility of regulation. These restrictions are not permitted within their ontology, which in my opinion makes the damning conclusion more powerful.
I strongly disagree with the authors political stance, which makes the fact that we agree on the problem / solution a nice bipartisan result
I see adds for these companies all the time on Muni buses. It’s very frustrating, and I wish the city would be more choosy about who they let advertise.
The system is run so that the corporations are #1 and people just there to feed the economy. That's why sports betting is allowed. Advertising in public spaces is another thing as you've noticed. Those bright electronic billboards are a net negative to society but still allowed. Guess who needs advertising come election time?
It's been fascinating to see how outlets like the NYT (which owns The Athletic) have largely given sports gambling companies like Kalshi and BetMGM a pass on this, given the amount of pearl clutching animosity that typifies rest of their tech coverage. Guess sponsoring 90% of all sports related content has it's benefits...
Gambling, in general, has a net negative effect on society. In my mind, it's an obfuscated version of the MLM pyramid scheme.
How do you see it as a MLM type scheme?
It seems more direct to me: either you lose to the house, or you lose to someone else while the house gets a cut. Is that second part what you see as MLMish?
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
I think eliminating online sports betting, and requiring it be done within the physical confines of a casino may help mitigate most of the concerns around this.
After all, sports betting was legal in several states such as NJ, Nevada, as long as they were taking place in the casinos in Atlantic City/Las Vegas, and we didn't see any major negative impacts like we do now.
If you want to bet on your ball, do it at the counter like the rest of us degenerates. Something, something, water cooler chat.
What I'd like to know is why did legalizing sports betting = complete change of the sports media landscape? Like the question asked doesn't seem to be around how sports betting has been integrated. it's just "is sports betting good or should we ban it."
Im fine with sports betting, what Im not fine with is my hockey games being saturated with ads, odds, and commentary about something that they keep telling us is tangential and not supposed-to-be-taken-seriously!
The whole thing is pathetic and I don't see how it's sustainable. There's going to be a Mothers Against Gambling movement or something after enough lives get wrecked.
And I'd like to add that most of the people throw the term around "lives get wrecked / ruined" flippantly around this, but that's exactly what it is. Your life is wrecked, you can't fix it, nothing can fix it. If only you never started gambling...
> What I'd like to know is why did legalizing sports betting
Financial interests.
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.
I wonder when they see legal betting on a company's future success as a bad thing for society. For now one can only dream, unfortunetaly.
Interesting, Horse Racing and Football in UK doesn't seems to have that effect at all. I wonder why is it specifically US?
…as opposed to illegal sports betting? ;)
If only this had been figured out before the gambling industry became too big to fail.
Reminds me of the quote: “Count on Americans to do the right thing… after they’ve exhausted all other options.”
China just straight banned it. Not a terrible idea IMO
One day some athlete is gonna get shot in the head by a crazed gambler who lost a lot of money on a bet because of them.
Wow, took them a while.
The problem isn't gambling. It's America's obsession with excess. There are always going to be people that get addicted but most people can enjoy it with limited downside if it's regulated properly, as it is in lots of other countries that have had legalised sports gambling for decades and more. Instead, sports in American have made gambling part of the broadcast and almost the point of playing the game.
Should never have been allowed in the first place, but no one learns from history
It's working as intended. Politics is setup to take from plebs and transfer to lords.
I'm not sure why we're talking about sports betting as if the "sports" part is relevant. The gambling industry in general is the business of selling hope to hopeless people. All of it is bad, and as long as we have the states themselves selling hundreds of millions of dollars of lottery tickets primarily to those living in poverty, this is never going to go away. It should not be legal to make money off of other people's suffering, which is exactly what this is.
You should be able to make a friendly competitive bet with your mates or coworkers or even strangers without getting in trouble. I am even fine with businesses facilitating this with apps or whatever. But I don't think anyone should be able to bet so much that it could make it hard for their social financial obligations to be met (taxes, rent/mortgage, utility bills, child support, etc). Otherwise society ends up having to help feed, house, clothe, rehab these people. You are giving people the choice to substantially wealth and at worst be saved by the social safety net, many people would take that bet.
Gambling on aggregators and platforms is bad because you are the new kid on the block betting against experts, people with enormous computing power and of course win or lose you have to give a cut to the aggregator or the platform.
Gambling and betting should be 1v1 , as soon as you introduce a pool or an aggregator the wise advice is to stay away if such pool or aggregator has more than say a certain amount of bettors (100k-1M), because you become the new kid on the block and the new kid on the block gets skinned.
Thing is the implication of all the above is that we should stay away from every stock market and that would be quite right considering how it produces such loopsided outcomes, not unlike the gambling platforms or even worse
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/
The USA is gambling it all away. Dangerous and dumb.
Everything is gambling . You are either gambling money or time or a combination or both to end up ahead in a particular metric that interests you
However gambling time is seen as virtous and to be celebrated, whereas gambling money is the devil.
At least if you lose money you can make it back, when you gamble time good luck getting back your 4 year studying for a gender studies degree.
Also here on HN gambling on a startup which most likely go to 0 is seen as amazing, whereas betting on the Jacksonville Jaguars to win the SuperBowl is seen as bad and to be condamned , even though the Jaguars bet is at least an order of magnitude more likely to generate profits than the startup one.
If I gamble by joining a startup, I am trying to provide something of value to someone. Otherwise, my startup will fail. The bet is not societally zero sum in expectation. Long odds, sure, but possibly value creating.
If I gamble on a sporting event, the outcome of the sporting event does not change. Someone wins. Someone loses. No value created. The outcome is societally zero sum in expectation.
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...
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.
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
Well we could just limit the _amount_ people gamble instead (say $1000 per year).
I have no idea if this is feasible.
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.
I just don't think those are good analogies.
For one, we are just discussing financial ruin. Not deaths by guns or cars. And it does not impact you. Or else you would need to just regulate poor spending habits. At worse.
I think in principle just about everyone agrees in freedom and liberty where it does not affect society. We usually disagree just about what constitutes 'affecting others'.
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.
It’s a completely legitimate question. It’s the same moral consideration behind whether drugs and alcohol should be legal. Banning them is good for people who can’t use them responsibly, but reduces the freedom of people who can. Given that we’ve flip flopped on the legality of alcohol, cannabis, and sports betting in the last 100ish years, it’s clear there is ambiguity about what is the best tradeoff.
Yes. I know it's incredibly selfish to push your laws on my body because you don't have self control.
How do you sleep at night, knowing you're a nosy fascist?
It's a tax on dumb people and addicts. It's bad for society because it's just draining resources from people who probably can't afford to lose them.
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.
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.
If stocks did not have positive expected return no one would invest. What you're talking about is daytrading where there's a large failure rate so much so people call it gambling because of the nature of how swingy and illogical it can be.
Besides that, there's also the perspective that options help stabilize the market via hedging.
Then why do people gamble? Negative expected return, they still do it.
I am also not sure what you are saying. The return on the average stock is negative, it is a empirical fact.
No one should be buying 0DTE options, it’s idiotic.
You should only use options as a way to make some extra money for actions you might have taken anyway, such as buying/selling a stock at a certain price.
>they ban you from the platform
Use a respectable platform that doesn't do that then.
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.
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
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 ... Buying a house
Because your money will at least get you a roof over your head. It's not a bet because it involves an element of chance. I can't believe you're seriously raising such an argument.
Certain forms of stock market operations are indeed banned from retail - for example "binary options" in the UK.
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.
> 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.
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.
The important distinction between gambling and options is that there are many additional information sources available to bias the outcome.
Options are a Bayesian game. Jane Street is much more likely to win than I am, but there are still rare cases where I could come out ahead with very high certainty (I know something they don't).
Card counting and being escorted out of the casino aside, there aren't any ways to acquire private information in a gambling context.
Why? Both sides could use hedging, both sides could derive economic benefits, etc.
On a per transaction level, for every dollar someone makes on a put/call option, the other person has to lose equivalent. Even more when you factor in exchange fees
Hedging is just an additional transaction that limits the damage if the bet doesn't pay off. You can do the same thing in gambling.
I buy a house to live in it, WTF are you buying one for?
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?
No it’s really not that nuanced. Society should ban things that are obvious traps and cause massive costs to society.
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.
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.
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.
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.