Without having thought much about it, I would think that it’s a) pretty addictive and b) “scales well”. Many forms of consumption have some ~natural limit, e.g. you can only eat so much food, going to the movies or concerts or whatever takes some energy and you probably wouldn’t want to do this every day. Even addictive activities like smoking tend to have at least somewhat of a cap on how much you spend on it. Whereas gambling (which sports betting probably basically is to many people) potentially can just eat up all your savings if you let it.
So it would at least seem that it has much more potential to be catastrophic for individuals with low self control, even though that’s a different story than the average effect on household investment, I guess.
Thanks! This makes me curious: is sports betting anomalous (among forms of consumption) in terms of how much it substitutes for financial investing?
Without having thought much about it, I would think that it’s a) pretty addictive and b) “scales well”. Many forms of consumption have some ~natural limit, e.g. you can only eat so much food, going to the movies or concerts or whatever takes some energy and you probably wouldn’t want to do this every day. Even addictive activities like smoking tend to have at least somewhat of a cap on how much you spend on it. Whereas gambling (which sports betting probably basically is to many people) potentially can just eat up all your savings if you let it.
So it would at least seem that it has much more potential to be catastrophic for individuals with low self control, even though that’s a different story than the average effect on household investment, I guess.