Comment by anonymous908213
9 hours ago
That is one of the takes I've ever read. There is a reason gambling is so tightly regulated worldwide, and it's certainly not because governments hate easy vice tax revenue. Gambling debt destroys family units, increases poverty rates (most notably for the children of gambling addicts -- the consequences are not localised only to the person making the bad decisions), and increases violent crime rates. Gambling is massively detrimental to society. There can be arguments in allowing people to do things that are detrimental to society in the name of freedom, but it's not a great thing to pretend those detriments don't exist at all.
Do you know of any studies that can accurately show the correlation between gambling and societal costs? On the surface the link makes sense to me and seems like it should be right, though I'm not sure how we could have tested it in a controlled way to really know the link exists.
There are a bunch of studies out there [0][1] (two I found immediately) showing the risks around problem gambling, but like with most vices people who’ve already picked the pro side tend to react in the same predictable ways (myself included):
1) Dismissal: Feigning or having a profound misunderstanding of how statistics work by poking at the methodology like “N=200? That’s meaningless.”
2) Apathy: “So what if some people get addicted? We can’t babysit everyone.”
3) Rationalization: “Yeah but it helps Native American reservations, so...”
4) Downplaying: "Ok problem gambling is bad, but how prevalent is problem gambling really?"
0: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-05439-001
1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32402593/
There's also a version of rationalization where people project arguments from the war on drugs to illegal gambling, as though the enforcement of illegal gambling was somehow had costs greater than just letting anyone bet any amount of money from their phones.
This is such a weird question, just go outside and interact with humans and the evidence is everywhere
In my country, lot of institutions running out-of-home-campaigns against gambling-addiction etc.; so yes, if public institutions are doing this then there is some evidence there
One study showed a significant increase in domestic violence after gamblers lost sports bets (based on the team for a specific city losing or winning and then comparing DV rates to cities before and after legal online sports betting).
I believe it increased it about 10%.
Do you know of any studies which show any evidence at all that gambling has no costs?