39 Comments

I assume that the gamblers are almost entirely male. I feel sorry for their wives and children.

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Another key point about the phone: social media. Being fed a media diet of locks and big wins feels inescapable once you're in the gambling algo's clutches. The way sports betting permeated so much of our visual life within years was entirely predictable and still wholly frustrating.

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The more time that passes, the more I like Paul Romer’s progressive tax on digital advertising revenue.

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I wonder if you could gate stuff like this by net worth. Political non starter, but it’s better for a millionaire to get fleeced by a hot chick selling you HUGE WINS than someone who can’t afford it

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I don’t think that’s sustainable politically, and wealth is a bad gating mechanism for things that are closer calls, like accredited investing or some recreational drugs. I don’t think the drug schedule schema is terrible in principle, especially if you added some extra levels at the bottom for things where nuisance-gating on the supply side is appropriate.

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I'd agree that it won't happen. If you gate by wealth, people are much less likely to go bankrupt given that they can afford to gamble

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We do this with investing (you need a liquid $1 million or make $200k per year) to become an accredited investor. My first instinct is to say this law should be repealed, look at how everyone is just allowed to gamble huge amounts of money (and crypto), but now I'm a little less sure.

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Yeah, it makes me uncomfortable to tell someone what they can and cannot buy. I guess the government has welfare anyway, so I think it's justified to try to get someone to make better financial choices, given that the government will end up giving them money and bankruptcy has social costs anyway

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What’s needed here from elite opinion makers is a framework that gets you stable justifications for putting and keeping things into category 2. Right now the only people pushing to take things out of 1 want to take them all the way to 3, which triggers rights-based arguments that entail keeping them at 1. If category 2 is an important category that we’re way under-using (and I think it is), it can’t only be embraced by 1-heads in extreme and exceptional cases. We need to spell out what makes a case exceptional and how we can tell, in a somewhat neutral way.

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The problem is that the Supreme Court's understanding of the way the First Amendment applies to commercial speech is a big part of what makes category 2 unstable. Even if we had widespread consensus among electeds and the public that X belongs in category 2, then the purveyors of X will sue to invalidate all the restrictions on advertising and move themselves back into category 1.

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Are you sure? Aren't there restrictions on advertising liquor on TV for example? And tobacco?

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Do you honestly feel like alcohol and tobacco are good examples of category 2? I feel like those are canonical examples of industrialized vices that cause a ton of harm to heavy users

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Hm. I remember when it was axiomatic that domestic violence went up on Super Bowl Sunday, until someone finally debunked that. So my eyebrows rose when you mentioned the DV link. It could of course be true, but it would be valuable to confirm.

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I have a similar background as you do on the gambling side. I've made a ton of money from various legal means over the years and now am mostly burnt-out on all things sports gambling. This is exacerbated by the industry mostly "figuring things out" so that people like me cannot win big anymore unless you want to devote monumental effort to establishing a bunch of spoof accounts.

This is obviously not a fair industry if that's what's required in order to win. Meanwhile, they'll spam me with ads and offers and would be all-too-happy to drive me to bankruptcy. They just want to be the site that does it, not lose that sweet business to another site (which are basically indistuingishable from each other).

The stats you cite are compelling. This is obviously not a net societal good. It also completely aligns with what our eyes and ears.

A few additional arguments. I've seen articles/studies arguing that the tax boost for states is more than offset by addiction counseling. But it's on a lag, so states don't realize that it's a bad deal from the start.

Do we really want all this advertising? First of all, it's really cringe. I can't imagine being a social high schooler and seeing all these ads while being unable to partake but wanting to. Not to mention that they are targeting e-sports basically explicitly for getting interest from teens. But these billboards and advertisements and in-broadcast promotion are so unnecessary and gets it to a wider audience than necessary. We all know where to find these lines - stop talking about and exposing young kids. Same thing with the weed billboards - do we really need to be this obnoxious with promotion? Everyone knows these products exist and how to find them if they want them.

Kicking it to the mob was arguably the perfect solution. It imposed a sort of KYC which ironically protected many from harm, either from potential embarrassment or because the mob knew what was or wasn't realistic from any given person.

Offshore books are a similarly decent solution, as fear of the site disappearing, or seizing winnings without explanation, would prevent life-changing big bets.

Instead we've chosen the most laissez-faire option for the cynical reason of "tax revenue." I hadn't really considered it before, but this is basically the definition of a luxury belief.

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Tbh, I would have expected sports betting to turn out to be bad, given what we already know about gambling in general.

The “trivial inconveniences” thing is interesting. Particularly as both good things and bad things might be discouraged by trivial inconveniences.

E.g. personally, this year I waited until the Covid19 vaccine was available free on the NHS, when I could have got it earlier from the pharmacist by paying (if I recall correctly) about £100. You might think £100 is big enough to be a more than trivial inconvenience. Still: interesting implications here for whenever the government is trying to manage a pandemic, if people won’t bother to get vaccinated if there are even small inconveniences in the way.

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I will leave the question open as to whether I was being economically irrational here, or having a revealed preference that I think the probability of me dying from Covid19, at this point in the pandemic, is fairly low.

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It's interesting how this situation mirrors in many ways changes in my view on drug legalization generally and marijuana legalization specifically. Note that I am still generally in favor of decriminalization, but I'm way less gung ho than I once was. I used to be in favor of legalization for a combination of libertarian reasons (people should be allowed to do what they want, even if its bad for them) and pragmatic reasons (drug prohibition was an expensive failure with massive social costs).

I didn't understand a few things:

1. Drug prohibition kind of works. It raises the cost of obtaining drugs so that people who want them can still mostly get them, but doing so is a pain and a lot of casual wannabe users won't bother.

2. Prohibition also imposes a social stigma on drug use that I used to think was hypocritical and absurd, but now seems instrumentally useful.

3. Unleashing the forces of capitalism on recreational marijuana use: bad idea.

4. All "sin" industries generally make most of their profits on heavy users, and those heavy users are often from the segment of society who suffer the most negative impacts from use.

There are policy approaches and equilibria that I still think could be a massive improvement over the status quo ante, similar to the state liquor monopolies that I used to abhor as ridiculous blue-law relics. But those policy approaches don't seem to be on the table.

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Great points. If's arguable that these are applicable to the detrimental effects of social media/tech use more broadly (in that the heaviest users are also the ones most likely to suffer disproportionally)

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Aside from watching nba highlights on YouTube I don’t watch sports. And I have zero interest in gambling. So it has been somewhat interesting, and surprising, to read about this world I had no clue about until relatively recently.

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In Denmark the government has a service (ROFUS), which anyone can voluntarily sign up for to exclude themselves from all gambling providers operating in Denmark. You can exclude yourself for a limited duration or permanently. The decision cannot be revoked.

Before discussing whether gambling should be legal or illegal, I would encourage Americans to see how far they can get with similar initiatives first.

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This is such a great idea!

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> If you had tried this stuff on me when I was watching customers, to the extent I noticed it at all, I am pretty sure I would if anything have caught you faster.

Was this at Jane Street? Why would you be watching customers?

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Thank you for this.

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I like the much more libertarian solution than "just ban it" of "self-exclusion" laws (and more generally they seem like they'd be good for other protect-you-from-yourself crimes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-exclusion

> In areas that have enacted self-exclusion policies, an individual who is aware that they suffer from a gambling problem can voluntarily request that their name be added to the self-exclusion list. If their application is accepted, the person in question becomes legally banned from all participating casinos within the self-exclusion coverage area. If a person who has been added to the self-exclusion list enters or attempts to enter a casino that participates in the self-exclusion program, they can be arrested and charged with trespassing.[1] In addition, any chips, tokens, credits or other winnings in their possession at the time of arrest can be confiscated or invalidated.

> [...]

> In some places, standardized liquor self-exclusion request forms are available online, and businesses are legally required to honor valid self-exclusion requests.

Of course, probably make the ability to add your name to the self-exclusion list easy, and the ability to remove your name hard.

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What about an approach that allows people to ban themselves ? Draft kings for example has some such functionality but the limits only last a week per my test just now. Plausibly, if someone did ruining their life with excessive gambling they’ll have at least one moment of clarity where they ban themselves for a while.

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Error: "we constantly imposing" in the first para of "How Does This Relate to Elite Hypocrisy?". This is either a trivial typo, or a larger problem to do with an unclosed tag or something.

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