A parable to elucidate my disagreement with parts of Zvi’s conclusion:
Jenny is a teenager in a boarding school. She starts cutting herself using razors. The school principal bans razors. Now all the other kids can’t shave and have to grow beards (if male) and have hairy armpits. Jenny switches to self-harming with scissors. The school principal bans scissors. Now every time the students receive a package they have to tear it open with their bare hands, and anyone physically weak or disabled has to go begging for someone to help them. Jenny smashes a mirror into glass shards, and self-harms with those. The principal bans mirrors...
Any sane adult here would be screaming at the principal. “No! Stop banning stuff! Get Jenny some psychological treatment!”
Yes, I know the parable is not an exact match to sports betting, but it feels like a similar dynamic. There are some people with addictive personality disorder and they will harm themselves by using a product that the majority of the population can enjoy responsibly[1]. (Per a comment above, 39% of the US population bet online, of whom only a tiny fraction will have a gambling problem.) The product might be gambling, alcohol, online porn, cannabis, or something else. New such products may be invented in future. But, crucially, if one product is not available, then these people will very likely form an addiction to something else[2]. That is what ‘addictive personality disorder’ means.
Sometimes the authorities want to ban the product in order to protect addicts. But no one ever asks the question: how can we stop them from wanting to self-harm in the first place? Because just banning the current popular method of self-harming is not a solution if people will go on to addict themselves to something else instead[3]. I feel that the discourse has quietly assumed a fabricated option: if these people can’t gamble then they will be happy unharmed non-addicts.
I am a libertarian, and I have great sympathy for Maxwell Tabarrok’s arguments. But in this case, I think the whole debate is missing a very important question. We should stop worrying about whether [specific product] is net harmful and start asking how we can fix the root cause of the problem by getting effective treatment to people with addictive personality disorder. And yes, inventing effective treatment and rolling it out on a population scale is a much harder problem than just banning [target of latest moral panic]. But it’s the problem that society needs to solve.
In my parable the principal bans ‘useful’ things, while authorities responding to addictive behaviour usually want to ban entertainment. That isn’t a crux for me. Entertainment is intrinsically valuable, and banning it costs utility—potentially large amounts of utility when multiplied across an entire population.
Zvi quotes research saying that legalizing sports betting resulted in a 28% increase in bankruptcies, which suggests it might be more financially harmful than whatever other addictions people had before, but that’s about as much as we can say.
I can see some sense in this take; I’ve personally succumbed to predatory gambling services in years past, and can attest from personal experience that successfully quitting one addiction leaves me exceedingly vulnerable to pick up a different one. I rotated through six different highly-damaging vices, before settling into a relatively less-harmful vice, and I was grateful to find myself there.
And that’s my point: you are in expectation doing someone who is inclined to addiction a favor by forcing them off of a particularly bad addiction.
You would be doing them a slightly bigger favor if you provide a much less-harmful replacement addiction at the same time. For me, the holy grail was to find a net-positive activity to slot into the addiction-shaped hole in my brain, and after a lifetime of struggle, I finally got “reading pop nonfiction books” to replace “scrolling social media”, the first real Good in a long line of Lesser Evils.
Thanks for the comment, and I agree that it would be helpful if the debate on this topic could focus on the question of ‘how do we encourage people to take up a less harmful addiction’—like vaping vs smoking—rather than typically jumping to the question of ban / don’t ban.
But, crucially, if one product is not available, then these people will very likely form an addiction to something else. That is what ‘addictive personality disorder’ means.
Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc.
I feel that the discourse has quietly assumed a fabricated option: if these people can’t gamble then they will be happy unharmed non-addicts.
This post isn’t quietly assuming something: it’s loudly giving evidence that they will be much less harmed.
“Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc.”
Yes, Zvi gives evidence on bankruptcy rates. However, that is not the only kind of harm. Sports gambling doesn’t have direct health effects the way that drug or alcohol addictions do. Different types of addictions hit relationships, and sports gambling isn’t good for relationships, but it’s plausibly less harmful than a porn addiction. Sports gambling leaves people functional and able to hold down a job, again in a way that not all other addictions do. I don’t think you can assert that banning sports gambling will make people ‘much less harmed’. Not unless you’ve done a deep dive into all the different forms of harm caused by different types of addiction which they might get instead. If someone like Scott Alexander did that kind of analysis and announced that banning sports gambling is still worthwhile because people will addict themselves to cannabis or porn and that is net better, that would be different, but so far as I know, no one has tried to answer the question.
Separate point: you also can’t make the jump from ‘sports gambling is harmful’ to ‘we should ban sports gambling’. Banning things also causes harm. It moderately reduces takeup, but doesn’t eliminate the thing banned—illegal gambling is a problem everywhere people ban it, Prohibition didn’t eliminate alcohol, and the War on Drugs didn’t magically stop people taking them. So banning things causes a moderate reduction in usage of the thing, with an empirical question mark over how much. Banning things also means criminalising people who would otherwise not be criminalised, ruining their lives. It means devoting more societal resources to police and prisons, to enforce the ban, or else it means diverting existing law enforcement resources away from dealing with other crimes. Even if you accept both that sports gambling is harmful to users (more harmful than whatever other thing they’d get addicted to instead) and that banning it would somewhat reduce usage of gambling, you still can’t come to a firm conclusion that banning it is net beneficial to society.
On Zvi’s levels of legality, I’m OK with the idea of making sports gambling a 2, ie legal with modest frictions, but I really don’t believe that society can justify going to level 3 and criminalising it. And, again, the whole should-we-ban-it debate is a distraction that doesn’t help with the broader question of how society can treat people with addictive personality disorder.
I think the fundamental problem is that yes, there are people with that innate tendency, but that is not in the slightest bit helped by creating huge incentives for a whole industry to put its massive resources into finding ways to make that tendency become as bad as possible. Imagine if we had entire companies that somehow profited from depressed people committing suicide and had dedicated teams of behavioural scientists and quants crunching data and designing new strategies to make anyone who already has the tendency maximally suicidal. I doubt we would consider that fine, right? Sports betting (really, most addiction-based industries) is like that. The problem isn’t just providing the activity, as some kind of relief valve. The problem is putting behind the activity a board of investors that wants to maximise profits and turns it into a full blown Torment Nexus. Capitalism is a terrible way of providing a service when the service is “self-inflicted misery”.
In terms of Zvi’s 4 levels of legality, I think that your reasoning is a valid argument against crossing the line between 2 and 3. However, I don’t think that it’s a valid argument against what Zvi is actually proposing, which is going from 1 to 2. If we have an obligation to help people who have APD, then the most cost-effective/highest-utility solution might involve making gambling less convenient for the general population.
A parable to elucidate my disagreement with parts of Zvi’s conclusion:
Jenny is a teenager in a boarding school. She starts cutting herself using razors. The school principal bans razors. Now all the other kids can’t shave and have to grow beards (if male) and have hairy armpits. Jenny switches to self-harming with scissors. The school principal bans scissors. Now every time the students receive a package they have to tear it open with their bare hands, and anyone physically weak or disabled has to go begging for someone to help them. Jenny smashes a mirror into glass shards, and self-harms with those. The principal bans mirrors...
Any sane adult here would be screaming at the principal. “No! Stop banning stuff! Get Jenny some psychological treatment!”
Yes, I know the parable is not an exact match to sports betting, but it feels like a similar dynamic. There are some people with addictive personality disorder and they will harm themselves by using a product that the majority of the population can enjoy responsibly[1]. (Per a comment above, 39% of the US population bet online, of whom only a tiny fraction will have a gambling problem.) The product might be gambling, alcohol, online porn, cannabis, or something else. New such products may be invented in future. But, crucially, if one product is not available, then these people will very likely form an addiction to something else[2]. That is what ‘addictive personality disorder’ means.
Sometimes the authorities want to ban the product in order to protect addicts. But no one ever asks the question: how can we stop them from wanting to self-harm in the first place? Because just banning the current popular method of self-harming is not a solution if people will go on to addict themselves to something else instead[3]. I feel that the discourse has quietly assumed a fabricated option: if these people can’t gamble then they will be happy unharmed non-addicts.
I am a libertarian, and I have great sympathy for Maxwell Tabarrok’s arguments. But in this case, I think the whole debate is missing a very important question. We should stop worrying about whether [specific product] is net harmful and start asking how we can fix the root cause of the problem by getting effective treatment to people with addictive personality disorder. And yes, inventing effective treatment and rolling it out on a population scale is a much harder problem than just banning [target of latest moral panic]. But it’s the problem that society needs to solve.
In my parable the principal bans ‘useful’ things, while authorities responding to addictive behaviour usually want to ban entertainment. That isn’t a crux for me. Entertainment is intrinsically valuable, and banning it costs utility—potentially large amounts of utility when multiplied across an entire population.
Or more than one something else. People can be addicted to multiple things, I’m just eliding that for readability.
Zvi quotes research saying that legalizing sports betting resulted in a 28% increase in bankruptcies, which suggests it might be more financially harmful than whatever other addictions people had before, but that’s about as much as we can say.
I can see some sense in this take; I’ve personally succumbed to predatory gambling services in years past, and can attest from personal experience that successfully quitting one addiction leaves me exceedingly vulnerable to pick up a different one. I rotated through six different highly-damaging vices, before settling into a relatively less-harmful vice, and I was grateful to find myself there.
And that’s my point: you are in expectation doing someone who is inclined to addiction a favor by forcing them off of a particularly bad addiction.
You would be doing them a slightly bigger favor if you provide a much less-harmful replacement addiction at the same time. For me, the holy grail was to find a net-positive activity to slot into the addiction-shaped hole in my brain, and after a lifetime of struggle, I finally got “reading pop nonfiction books” to replace “scrolling social media”, the first real Good in a long line of Lesser Evils.
Thanks for the comment, and I agree that it would be helpful if the debate on this topic could focus on the question of ‘how do we encourage people to take up a less harmful addiction’—like vaping vs smoking—rather than typically jumping to the question of ban / don’t ban.
Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc.
This post isn’t quietly assuming something: it’s loudly giving evidence that they will be much less harmed.
“Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc.”
Yes, Zvi gives evidence on bankruptcy rates. However, that is not the only kind of harm. Sports gambling doesn’t have direct health effects the way that drug or alcohol addictions do. Different types of addictions hit relationships, and sports gambling isn’t good for relationships, but it’s plausibly less harmful than a porn addiction. Sports gambling leaves people functional and able to hold down a job, again in a way that not all other addictions do. I don’t think you can assert that banning sports gambling will make people ‘much less harmed’. Not unless you’ve done a deep dive into all the different forms of harm caused by different types of addiction which they might get instead. If someone like Scott Alexander did that kind of analysis and announced that banning sports gambling is still worthwhile because people will addict themselves to cannabis or porn and that is net better, that would be different, but so far as I know, no one has tried to answer the question.
Separate point: you also can’t make the jump from ‘sports gambling is harmful’ to ‘we should ban sports gambling’. Banning things also causes harm. It moderately reduces takeup, but doesn’t eliminate the thing banned—illegal gambling is a problem everywhere people ban it, Prohibition didn’t eliminate alcohol, and the War on Drugs didn’t magically stop people taking them. So banning things causes a moderate reduction in usage of the thing, with an empirical question mark over how much. Banning things also means criminalising people who would otherwise not be criminalised, ruining their lives. It means devoting more societal resources to police and prisons, to enforce the ban, or else it means diverting existing law enforcement resources away from dealing with other crimes. Even if you accept both that sports gambling is harmful to users (more harmful than whatever other thing they’d get addicted to instead) and that banning it would somewhat reduce usage of gambling, you still can’t come to a firm conclusion that banning it is net beneficial to society.
On Zvi’s levels of legality, I’m OK with the idea of making sports gambling a 2, ie legal with modest frictions, but I really don’t believe that society can justify going to level 3 and criminalising it. And, again, the whole should-we-ban-it debate is a distraction that doesn’t help with the broader question of how society can treat people with addictive personality disorder.
I think the fundamental problem is that yes, there are people with that innate tendency, but that is not in the slightest bit helped by creating huge incentives for a whole industry to put its massive resources into finding ways to make that tendency become as bad as possible. Imagine if we had entire companies that somehow profited from depressed people committing suicide and had dedicated teams of behavioural scientists and quants crunching data and designing new strategies to make anyone who already has the tendency maximally suicidal. I doubt we would consider that fine, right? Sports betting (really, most addiction-based industries) is like that. The problem isn’t just providing the activity, as some kind of relief valve. The problem is putting behind the activity a board of investors that wants to maximise profits and turns it into a full blown Torment Nexus. Capitalism is a terrible way of providing a service when the service is “self-inflicted misery”.
In terms of Zvi’s 4 levels of legality, I think that your reasoning is a valid argument against crossing the line between 2 and 3. However, I don’t think that it’s a valid argument against what Zvi is actually proposing, which is going from 1 to 2. If we have an obligation to help people who have APD, then the most cost-effective/highest-utility solution might involve making gambling less convenient for the general population.