The government will never intervene while the UK gambling industry contributes so much money. In 2022, the total figure was about £14 billion. See https://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk/report/annual-report-a...
In what other industry are those societal harms acceptable?
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/gambling-related-...
I’m drawing a blank on the positive externalities gambling provides to offset its downsides? Reducing illegal gambling...
So:
* 1.2 million people die every year in car accidents
* 200k children die every year
* pollution, air pollution, but also noise pollution
* people sitting in traffic for hours every day, effectively doing nothing productive
* decade long destruction of communities to build roads.
* additionally and especially in the US these have been used to target communities of minorities
* Etc.
It does have also positive externalities, but the rare communities worldwide that decided to promote other means of transport in every day life have found they are better off. Thus in a lot of cases the negatives outweigh the positives.
Is this an excuse for gambling? No, but there are many of these around us in every day life, we just don't notice them. So I was merely answering a question asked.
Those communities have phones. Manufactured goods. They're watching Game of Thrones. If you remove motor vehicles all of that simply isn't possible due to the loss of productivity.
While I agree that preventing the intrusion of motor vehicle in residential areas would be good (ie have main roads where they're allowed, and small residential streets where they aren't. Lots of cities in Europe shifting to this currently), saying that the negatives outweigh the positives "in a lot of cases" I think is completely incorrect.
Negative externalities implies the net externalities are negative for some 3rd party, not just that there’s any negatives.
Economists don’t want to discourage net positive activities like exercise because they have some downsides. ‘People get hurt at the gym and occasionally miss work!’ isn’t a compelling argument. Frankly it’s meaningless to look at downsides in isolation, all that tells you is what scale it’s operating at.
Suppose smoking retained the unpleasant odor, but the health effects where reversed so smokers and people breathing second hand smoke lived significantly longer and healthier lives. Would economists suggest taxing it more to limit how many people smoked or limit where they could smoke? Of course not even though it had some downsides in terms of odor the benefits would hypothetically outweigh them.
Where it makes sense is when you’re pulling in outside money from foreigners, but I don’t think many people go to the UK to gamble.
The same people who will say that gambling should be illegal are the same people who believe that you should be allowed to take any amount of psychoactive drugs that are addictive for almost everyone and leave a double-digit proportion of users with mental illness (as is apparent to anyone who has compared the US with other countries, the number of mentally ill people is staggering).
In particular, the US was the largest gambling market before...when it was illegal. The reason why it is legal is harm reduction. In addition, if you look at some markets where it is not only legal but significant government intervention in activity of gambling companies you find harm because it causes people to go back to illegal casinos.
All of this stuff has been proven over and over again across the world. But the reality is that people do not like other people doing things they don't do themselves. That is it.
And, for some reason, no-one had an issue when large donors to both US political parties were able to pass laws to make competition in gambling illegal. Massive political corruption that people who talk about morals had no issue with whatsoever...again, because it isn't about morals, it is about other people doing something they don't like and them wanting to stop them doing it.
Gambling is definitely one of the weird ones because it is only in countries like the US and China where gambling has a terrible rep...because it has been illegal and a great source of revenue for organised crime. In places like the UK, people gamble, they have fun, and just get on with their lives (again, it is so strange that the US has this attitude...drugs, morbid obesity...no, it is people betting on the Kentucky Derby that need to be brought to heel...of course, not the homeless person smoking crack, it is the guy betting $20 on the SuperBowl, he just can't control himself, the animal).
Finally, something that the Guardian never mention is that the only people gambling addiction treatment in the UK up to about three years ago was...gambling companies. NHS wouldn't fund it at all. I think people assume that the government will regulate correctly, that the government will create a better solution...nowhere is this more apparently wrong than in gambling sector (and one big issue in the UK has been increasing growth of the unregulated sector due to the significant rise in the cost of getting a licence due to the skyrocketing budget/staffing in the Gambling Commission...it is more important for them to keep budgets growing, keep the pay rises than reduce harm...who could have forseen this?).
The reason why the other information is included is because if you are arguing from fact, you do not understand this topic. None of the arguments are fact-based (when someone says they made a decision based on data, it does not mean it is objective).
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63bc25b4d3bf7...
This looks fairly official and cites 1.05 to 1.77 billion £ in societal cost on page 6. That’s less than 14 billion £.
And I’m not even saying that gambling is fine or should be supported, I was just sceptical of the claim that the damages exceed the income.
It’s one of those things where yes people are forking over 14 billion per year, but that’s because they have 14 billion which would otherwise be spent on something else. Even just VAT on 14 billion gets close to the total tax revenue from UK gambling especially when you include other economic losses.
So where’s the benefit?
"Looking from a wider societal perspective, there are a range of costs that have not, or have only been partially quantified here (such as crime, education, cultural harms, impacts on relationships and wider impacts on the families of gamblers). For these reasons, we believe the figures of £412.9 million and £635 to £1,355.5 million to be an underestimate of the true scale of the total economic burden associated with harmful gambling."
you caught me in a bad mood, and I was sure of something and i was wrong.
i still think it is perverse to argue in favor of gambling companies - an "industry" that is at best zero sum, simply reallocating money from one hand to an arguably less deserving hand. but in practice is dramatically negative sum when families are torn apart.
That’s looking at harm specifically not economic costs.
Direct taxes to the state are £3.3 billion, but that also ignores missing tax revenue both directly from people spending money on gambling instead of other activities and missing revenue from that economic harm.
So offsetting ~1.5 billion in harm is an optimistic net gain of 0.7 billion in tax revenue.
We should crack down on these firms. They're a net negative for Britain.