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.
I don’t know if “don’t even discuss other methods until you’ve tried this first” seems right to me, but I do think such services seem pretty great, and would guess that expanding/building on them (including e.g. requiring that any gambling advertising included an ad for them) would be a lot more tractable than pursuing harder bans.
What actually works is clearly the most important thing here, but aesthetically I do like the mechanism of “give people the ability to irreversibly self exclude” as a response to predatory/addictive systems.
This exists in the US as well. Because legalized gambling is regulated by the state governments the self exclusion programs are also run by them. Here is one for the state of Massachusetts https://massgaming.com/about/voluntary-self-exclusion/
I’ve heard that, in Las Vegas, if you put yourself on the government’s “compulsive gambler” list, you can still walk into any casino, give them your money, and place a bet—the only difference being that, if you happen to win, the casino keeps your money as if you had lost.
I think it should work the other way around, making it the casino’s responsibility to avoid accepting bets from self-proclaimed problem gamblers—if you’re on the list and the casino doesn’t stop you from betting, the casino has to give you back any money you lose.
The failure mode of the current policy sounds to me like “pay for your own lesson to feel less motivated to do it again” while the failure mode of this proposal would be “one of the casinos might maybe help you cheat the system which will feel even more exciting”—almost as if the people who made the current policy knew what they were doing to set aligned incentives 🤔
Without looking it up, I’d bet there are plenty of people who get added to this list by mistake, and can’t get themselves removed, like the people who got put on the US’s no-fly list, or get declared dead.
A perhaps more interesting interaction is with wills that are managed by trusts. My understanding is that you can put conditions on how the money in a trust will be disbursed to your heirs, for example “as long as they maintain a minimum GPA in college”. I have heard lawyers make outrageous jokes like adding a clause that says “as long as they don’t marry that person”.
It’s quite reasonable to expect that some will add a clause to their trust that says “this only pays out if they have placed themselves on the lifetime no-gambling list”.
I’ll crosspost the comment I left on substack:
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.
A similar service exists in the UK—https://www.gamstop.co.uk/
I don’t know if “don’t even discuss other methods until you’ve tried this first” seems right to me, but I do think such services seem pretty great, and would guess that expanding/building on them (including e.g. requiring that any gambling advertising included an ad for them) would be a lot more tractable than pursuing harder bans.
What actually works is clearly the most important thing here, but aesthetically I do like the mechanism of “give people the ability to irreversibly self exclude” as a response to predatory/addictive systems.
This exists in the US as well. Because legalized gambling is regulated by the state governments the self exclusion programs are also run by them. Here is one for the state of Massachusetts https://massgaming.com/about/voluntary-self-exclusion/
I’ve heard that, in Las Vegas, if you put yourself on the government’s “compulsive gambler” list, you can still walk into any casino, give them your money, and place a bet—the only difference being that, if you happen to win, the casino keeps your money as if you had lost.
I think it should work the other way around, making it the casino’s responsibility to avoid accepting bets from self-proclaimed problem gamblers—if you’re on the list and the casino doesn’t stop you from betting, the casino has to give you back any money you lose.
The failure mode of the current policy sounds to me like “pay for your own lesson to feel less motivated to do it again” while the failure mode of this proposal would be “one of the casinos might maybe help you cheat the system which will feel even more exciting”—almost as if the people who made the current policy knew what they were doing to set aligned incentives 🤔
Without looking it up, I’d bet there are plenty of people who get added to this list by mistake, and can’t get themselves removed, like the people who got put on the US’s no-fly list, or get declared dead.
It seems you need MitID (Denmarks national login system) to sign up online, so this seems very unlikely. If it happens, you have a far bigger problem.
Also, a system with a few false positives still sounds far better than the current situation.
A perhaps more interesting interaction is with wills that are managed by trusts. My understanding is that you can put conditions on how the money in a trust will be disbursed to your heirs, for example “as long as they maintain a minimum GPA in college”. I have heard lawyers make outrageous jokes like adding a clause that says “as long as they don’t marry that person”.
It’s quite reasonable to expect that some will add a clause to their trust that says “this only pays out if they have placed themselves on the lifetime no-gambling list”.