America's bad bet on expanding legal sports gambling
The United States is in the midst of a sports gambling boom, and it may be a generational policy mistake.
Anyone who has watched the Super Bowl, listened to a sports podcast, walked into an arena that has a gambling parlor, or, in my case, opened my mailbox to see direct mail from DraftKings offering “free bets” has seen the explosion in sports betting throughout the US.
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The result has been an explosion in gambling. And based on the research we have, the harm such widespread adoption has caused is not trivial. With the United States’s boom so recent and therefore data somewhat sparse, the United Kingdom is a useful comparison. It has had a legalized and regulated system for over 15 years, one that includes not just sports but casino gambling.
An extensive report by Bloomberg cataloged the harms since legalization: Sixty percent of industry profits come from the top 5 percent of users; the industry, supposedly regulated, has an estimated 36,000 children addicted to it; the government estimates 8 percent of suicides are gambling related.
In 2016, the situation was already so bad that the co-founder of Paddy Power, an industry leader, resigned from the company’s board while “fighting back tears” because he believed he was complicit in an immoral industry, Bloomberg reported.
Since then, the situation has only gotten worse, and amid a surge of suicides linked to gamblers deep in debt, the UK government has promised a policy plan on the gambling industry paired with reforms and new regulations.
https://www.vox.com/23641580/draftkings-fanduel-sports-betting-gambling-problems-march-madness
The Pareto principle predicts this outcome, they knew most of the profits were going to come from problem users, that's how it works.
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