America's betting craze has spread to its news networks
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
One stat that gives me hope: young people aged 18-29, one of the prime targets for this gambling push, were asked if legalized betting is bad for society. In 2022 only 22% did, in 2025 41% do:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/02/americans...
The damage is clear, everyone sees it. Only question is whether anyone will actually do anything about it now that the cat is out of the bag.
> A survey conducted in 2023 by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), the governing body of college sport, found that 60% of college students have gambled on sport.
A lot of things that are basically ok when one dude with ordinary human liability does it become horrible when corporations enter the mix. IMO it’s not contrary to liberalism to tamp down on the use of corporations for these purposes. They’re creations of the state, after all.
It's very easy to see why it's such a tempting business model.
The commercials are a celebration of addiction, and its disgusting to those of us who have struggled with addiction and know, like you say, the damage is clear. And they tacitly admit it too at the end of the commercial where they hurriedly say "struggling with gambling addiction? call this number." As if that absolves anything.
And it's not just the gambling either. A typical commercial break these days consists of: gambling ads where they try to get you addicted, crypto ads where they try to bilk you, political ads where they lie to you, and then there's the omnipresent pharmaceutical ads. Now we've got AI ads on top of it all. Every one of those ad categories should be made illegal, like tobacco advertising.
I think regulating too hard here would result in black markets and gamblers becoming more vulnerable to bad actors.
Yes, there was a fair amount of unlicensed sports betting, and of course a pro sports scandal every so often.
Alternatively, if you cap the amount of bets the bookies can retain, that might solve my immediate problem of I'm so tired of seeing the sports players with betting ads on their jerseys, the commentators yapping about bets, and then half of the commercials are sports betting ads. If they can't keep much, they won't have money to advertise.
Personally, I enjoyed the ads a lot more when the poker industry was advertising their no money .net sites and hoping people would just happen to go to their .com sites instead. That was at least a little amusing.
Treat gambling like tobacco or alcohol, basically.
The institutions that enable gambling receive the majority of the upside, while society receives all the negative externalities of people not being able to pay their bills, digging themselves into holes, not able to participate in the real economy.
The institutions enabling this use dark patterns and addictiveness to fuel a cycle of dependence.
I am also of the libertarian ideology that we should mostly let people do whatever they want so long as it doesn't hurt others. But lately I've been starting to think there are some habits (gambling) and some drugs (fentanyl) that are impossible to use responsibility and that destroy individuals and degrade society.
I think gambling should be regulated and taxed. This should not be such a lucrative or desirable industry to target.
At least gambling in the stock market, housing market, etc. is actually tied to real securities and derivatives. Betting on sports is useless. It pads the wallets of the gambling marketplaces and decreases the fitness, mental health, and security of the losers.
It is already heavily regulated (which I think makes sense), and the regulators are the ones enabling this recent expansion because they want the tax revenue.
And I say this as someone who very, very rarely gambles outside of fantasy sports.
Its generally the case that people didn't ask for it, most of the legalization of gambling in 21st century America was done by state legislatures, not referendums, and there's plenty of evidence that lobbying had a big role in this. However its also true that the public failed to reject it, most of the times it was put to referendum. Most people probably never asked for it, but when they were themselves asked most people took a libertarian position and said let people do as they want, even if it harms their kids by ruining their family finances...
“Except in Nebraska!” (Sorry I mean Pokerstars New Jersey.)
There are many places where gambling has been fully legal for decades. We should be able to look at data to make conclusions about whether something is good or bad.
(I do, however, wish people would shine a spotlight on scratch off tickets... mainly because the odds are so terrible compared to how they're advertised -- if it weren't state-sponsored, I don't think private companies would be able to get away with running ads for lottery tickets that pay out so incredibly poorly)
On top of that, we don't have the granulatity of data you seem to think we do that would allow anyone to definitively determine that legalized gambling is the cause of any specific characteristic of a nation, state, or locality.
And to be honest, i think lootboxes and "gambling" with fake (but real. but fake) money like on Roblox is worse.
[edit[ But it is absolutely a _moral_ debate. That's basically the only debate that is relevant.
I don’t care about most vice industries, even ones that have harm and addiction. What I care deeply about is advertising and persuasion. Gambling should be allowed, however bookmakers should never be allowed to initiate contact to entice the behavior. No push notifications, no ads, no TV network, no tv sponsorships. If people want to engage in your vice, they should have to find you.
Also, severe penalties. If a kid somehow gets access to an account, the bookmaker should have to unwind and refund all bets that they can’t definitively prove were made by an adult in addition to paying fines, or something similarly draconian. The burden of proof and responsibility needs to be on the people providing something that is proven dangerous to society. If that means that we can’t have betting apps, that’s fine.
The proven societal harms of the sports gambling boom more than justify this level of regulation.
At least if the sponsor is a truck company, they're selling me a truck for money. Maybe I don't need a truck, but I give them money and I get a truck that I might get utility out of.
Gambling is purely to separate chumps from their money, as much as possible, and then we as a society have to deal with that shit.
Some sports star selling me shoes, whatever. Gambling? It's more like "hey dumb asses..."
Sports betting ads and apps are everywhere in Australia with practically no restrictions. You cannot avoid it, every free to air channel is basically now sponsored by sports betting ads, every traditional newspaper is kept alive by sports betting ads and every second billboard and poster is for sports betting. Children are now exposed and normalised to it from birth.
Absolutely nothing is being done from a regulatory point of view. It enables traditional media and it seems traditional media still call the shots in Australia.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/12/pro-teen-social-media-b...
IDK if the left is as tied up in it as the right, but that was about a decade ago and I haven’t had more insight since, but judging from the effects I believe it must have gotten far worse. Those orgs pull in stupid money and that one, at least, was using it to boost both gambling legality and far-right politics generally. That had the ears of a lot of the public, and of a lot of politicians.
Couple that with post-Citizens-United “dark money”… yeah, we’re in a bad place and there’s hardly even any awareness of all this outside some politics-nerd circles.
Democrats dominate the legislature in California, and they are deep in the pocket of Indian gaming.
I think it's both a cause of and a symptom of the middle class disappearing.
Part of the compulsion towards gambling and lotteries is this sense that there's no other viable path upwards from where you are.
If you can't even imagine a reasonable chance of success from starting a small business, finding a better job, going back to school, or some other healthy path towards security and prosperity, then literally rolling the dice starts to seem like the most tangible (if unlikely) path towards wealth.
People gamble when they believe they don't have any better opportunities to spend their meager amount of discretionary income on.
(Of course, there is a separate compulsion towards gambling that is more a direct mental illness like alcoholism. But if you see a large-scale rise in gambling, I think you need to look for societal causes.)
And there are notoriously betting groups around the world that have made fortunes off of betting on horse racing. I'd bet that they feel superior to people betting on commodities and productive assets when they could be betting on horses.
Legalized sports betting has broken the deal! Now we get the worst of both worlds.
I have been in pubs with sky sports on occasionally, and it just looks like wall-to-wall.
When I was a lad the local football team was sponsored by an international company with a large local factory. Manchester United were sponsored by a TV company. People did gambling, it tended to be old men in grubby bookies and fruit machines, middle-aged ladies doing social events like bingo, the grand national, and then along came Mystic Meg saying how someone with hair may be lucky tonight for their £1 weekly stake.
We managed to ban smoking adverts from things like snooker, but the replacement is just as bad, in a different way
Sounds wonderful...
Gambling advertising is an awful, terrible, no-good idea. Gambling is a zero-sum activity that doesn't increase productivity or happiness. There's no reason to create demand for it.
Gambling apps, or any kind of online gambling for that matter, is the same. Allowing online gambling is like piping whisky into every alcoholic's home.
Keep all gambling in meatspace. Don't allow it to be advertised.
Not that I think it should be outlawed. But I think it makes more sense to not make money laundering a crime, and allow criminals to put the money straight in the bank rather than having to do this dance where we pretend it is going to gambling or houses or whatever and meanwhile legally enriching even further a bunch of people who otherwise are generating far less 'value' for society.
I don't know the IRS's stance on money claimed to have been won in unauthorized, backroom card games.
Illegal casinos wouldn't solve that problem as they'd be back to square one of explaining the legal source of a large amount of money.
They have to report that a gambler (actually criminal money launderer) won money that they did not. They would also claim fake equivalent losses on their business taxes - it would be very suspicious if they did not.
That's two crimes.
Ok? So the hypothetical MO is: Go to a casino, buy $200 worth of chips with cash, gamble till there's $150 left, then cash the chips out? And that's "clean" money?
Because unless the launderer is good at gambling they aren't walking away with more money than they walked in with. And if done consistently it will still draw questions about where the initial $200 came from (assume it's more like $2m).
I've never gambled in a casino so I don't know how this would work.
When they win the lottery, one gas station reports the winnings of $800,000 on a $1 bet. Launderer reports earning $1 selling a Pokémon card, and $800,000 winning the lottery. Other gas stations and dirty income, unreported, as small losses dont require individual reporting.
End result is $800,000 clean on $1,000,000 of dirty money and only $1 has to be explained.
For casinos, it's likely something closer to buying chips under the reporting threshold, losing most of them, and keeping on until winning a longshot bet. Or just claiming they are a card counter or some nonsense as to how they keep it up. The fact they lose some money to the house is just the cost of doing business. The fact winnings are reported, desirable.
It isn't just about the money or whether some corporation rakes in a few more dollars... It's about the way this stuff rewires people's brains. I read a piece about sports betting apps driving anxiety and depression in young men recently. And there was another report pointing out that kids as young as eleven are tempted to gamble when their favourite influencers promote betting codes...
These little hits of dopamine condition people early... It's not enough to say 'buyer beware' if the buyer is twelve. The normalization of gambling as just another entertainment product is insidious. I REALLY worry that we'll look back at this moment like we do with tobacco ads. People knew something was off, BUT it took decades for the laws to catch up.
ALSO the pressure for growth means the industry will keep pushing into new spaces... There are serious public health consequences here and some countries are starting to treat it like that. I hope we don't wait until the damage is everywhere before acting.
Allegedly, per the indictment:
> Overall, between 2023 and 2025, the Bettors won at least $400,000 from the Betting Platforms on pitches thrown by the defendant EMMANUEL CLASE DE LA CRUZ.
We already are regularly asked to accept mere emotionally motivated opinion as information. Of course its relayed as "fact-based reporting", wrapped in mostly tidy narratives which wear the makeup of a journalistic endeavor. But look at which facts are amplified, suppressed, or omitted; or the adjectives used around the facts or which facts are only ever spoken by the journalists and which facts are allowed to be conveyed directly by the participants. Even the choice of which stories are newsworthy and which aren't plays a role.
Modern journalism is already largely a call to action for adopting a particular worldview rather than an effort to ensure that you have the best information in formulating opinions. The press, the government, and activists already have taken the stand that you are a fool that is better manipulated into "correct thinking" by your betters than left to your own devices.
Given all that, I would contend that most reporting is not there to inform you in the first place: its there to manipulate your emotions on a subject while convincing you that somehow you are now "informed". I would say under those circumstances that any trust that still exists in the media is already misplaced. The betting question is just another avenue exacerbating an already unreliable journalistic landscape.
The only exception is betting on anything political or legal, because once you can take bets on those, you'll be incentivized to influence the result in the favor of your bet. And that will mess up the free markets and the free world of ideas and opinions, and seems like a problem for democracy.
Worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition
And of course, they ignore all the major sports sponsorships from these companies, which would otherwise make it impossible to air the most popular sporting events in the state now.
It's an easy solution but it's easier to get a kid to eat vegetables than get gamblers to accept that gambling is actually bad.
That's a good thing? But it opens up a Pandora's box of bad things, too.
It isn't. It's merely a measure of people's confidence in the event's outcome, and even if in aggregate people are 99.9% confident of something, they can be wrong (and often are). Yet often, when I get into debates about the likelihood of some event, people will often point to these markets as a refutation of the argument or in support of theirs. It probably shouldn't bother me as much as it does, because there's a lot of money to be made from delusion .
Has anyone else heard horror stories since sports betting became legal?
I don't dig into the details and obviously everyone is diffrent but I imagine not being able to avoid the constant bombardment when trying to quit isn't a good thing
I worked in the industry over a decade ago and it was nasty already. Know a few people who managed to gamble away entire inheritances.
When (not if) stuff like Polymarket gets legal in Germany, it will get even worse.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/how-a-psychiatrist-...
Most was lost at DraftKings’ casino apps though, not their sports betting.