Sports betting is in the news today, with the rise of Kalshi and Polymarket. Critics point to many issues, but I think most are excuses; what really bothers most is just typical sports bets. On reflection, I’m a bit puzzled by this. Let me explain.
Last time I checked, sports bookies are mostly banning competent gamblers and only allowing innumerate gamblers to play. In your own terms, banning sports betting is adaptive for societies because it’s a zero sum or typically negative sum use of money
There's also the question of *which members* of society are most engaging in the negative-sum betting, what they'd be doing instead if sports betting were not as easily available of an option, and whether their own past or future or counterfactual selves would agree with their present self's choice to so engage.
It's our present self that always gets to choose among available choices in the moment. But our past selves were similarly free to take actions in which they could choose to alter what those available present choices are, and to consider what our future selves would want those choices to have included, in so altering.
I agree, this is something Robin Hanson understands perfectly well in so many other contexts. In fact he routinely seems to assume most people share or endorse such understanding, and express surprise when they don't react well to proposals he makes that rely it.
Probably as a kind of imperfect commitment mechanism. We see an activity where people tend to express a desire to do less of it when in far mode than they actually do when in near mode -- in other words it shows hyperbolic discounting -- we reasonably suspect that people are acting in utility negative ways.
Some kind of truly effective system where people could sign up to prevent themselves from gambling (eg to remove yourself from the ban list requires taking action months before you are removed) or to impose dollar limits on themselves might be preferable if we could make it work. The difficulty is that implementing it is difficult because it requires people verify who they are and raises concerns about people placing bets for others. But I still think would be a good idea.
I believe some states do have this for casinos but not in a very effective or advertised form.
> We see an activity where people tend to express a desire to do less of it when in far mode than they actually do when in near mode -- in other words it shows hyperbolic discounting
I don't think that's actually the same thing as hyperbolic discounting. The latter is a kind of time-varying (hence inconsistent) time-preference, while the former is a "wanting to want" kind of different thing. Per Hanson, "far mode" is more a matter of signalling.
There is an implicit assumption in there that when we talk about what we would like to be doing in the far future we are working in far mode while when we act immediately we are in near mode. I agree that may not always literally be true but I do think it tends to be the case.
But no, far and near mode aren't per se about signaling -- they have relations to that but they are broad modes of thinking.
Sports betting is unlike the lottery, or casino games, in that the outcome can be thrown by the participants. According to Gemini in the U.S. there is 8x greater volume of bets on the big four leagues than there are salary payouts to athletes. At some scale there is an obvious moral hazard to collude.
I think a big difference is that sports gambling seems to be fine for most people but extremely harmful to a small subset of people.
While this can be true if dating and financial markets - those have strong upsides.
Alcohol is the most similar case where it has harmful and concentrated downsides but I think it is less extreme than gambling. (I for example would prefer if a loved one had an alcohol addiction rather than a gambling addiction).
This argument is clever on the surface but fundamentally unserious. It reduces a complex, evidence-rich problem to a taxonomy of “pleasures,” while ignoring the defining characteristic that distinguishes modern gambling from most other indulgences: it is a designed extraction system, not merely a discretionary pastime. The claim that sports betting is just another harmless pleasure disintegrates under even modest empirical scrutiny. For a more rigorous treatment of the issue, see my analysis here: https://mdarwin.substack.com/p/the-corrosion-of-civilization-sportsbooks?r=706cmj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I think you are incorrect to classify drug bans as being about physical harm, and that drugs are the right comparison for sports betting. Drugs cause physical harm primarily to the people who choose to use them. All the other physical harms you mentioned are non-consensual. And it's really only the non-consensual physical harms that we ban, as shown by the fact that we only ban corporal punishment in the context of disciplining a child, not in the context of BDSM.
I think the reason we ban drugs is more about the addiction - people who use drugs tend to re-orient their motivation systems around the drugs to such an extent that they destroy their lives, and often the lives of those who depend on them. And we are seeing the same harms with sports betting.
It's a tell about a latent predatory market people feel uncomfortable naming because of its relation to incendiary scientific topics considered taboo amongst common people
>Yes, sports bets can waste time and money, but so do a great many allowed pleasures.
Most of those don't tend to be obviously destructive. Alcohol is of course a notable exception, and perennially a popular ban candidate, but those bans usually end up even more destructive.
Spanking & corporal punishment don't fit well in that list. They aren't classed as "pleasures" usually, but instead means of punishment.
I have noticed that a lot of the people who are unhappy about the rise in sports betting also dislike the legalization/decriminalization of marijuana, certain places decriminalizing hard drugs, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and permitting the homeless to take up valuable public space at the expense of the rest of the population. Rather than an "exception", I'd say it's a kind of heightened backlash against a larger trend.
Social behavior models over the decades have researched the issue of compulsive behaviors associated with attention detraction as a method of social awareness, as a social-exchange theory in Kelley's theory of what the self gives up for what they get back. Watching and engaging in a social experience of talk with similarly interested personalities around a mode of entertainment, baseball, football, and others, where the exchange is emotions of positive arousal when you win the betting pool before others in that social group, gives narrative to the rationalization of what you get in exchange for the money given into the bets. Aaronson and Bandura, along with others, find that certain personality types find this process especially attractive as a habit. Whether science can say there is a neuro-hormonal trait associated or, more significantly, a social development history in early childhood is not yet very clear, but a group has always shown somewhere in a city that engages in a habit of some kind that we can generally refer to as sports betting. Other examples where money crisis happens in society are alcoholism, drug addiction, and compulsive sexual over-reaching in social expression. Local and eventually state and national law will try to help manage a crisis where persons suffer and cause social harm to others associated with them, because of anti-social habits. But it does seem that the level of political capital in social media content around sports betting has more to do with how easy morality story narratives are written that are socially digestible to the general public on this one, compared to the more ugly, destructive, codependent habits like STD spreading, hyper-sexual over-reach expression, or bodies found to be dying horrifically at the street curb in the city. The writing and opinion publishing social media industry finds the content easy to write and rarely complain about much upon reception in the general public, and the story will sell the magazine or other venue as a writing product. I can see why others say making some kind of rules for this entertainment activity to prevent binges might be a good idea. If anything in particular is enough to detract from that happening, it is probably the cost of administration for it. This makes me think of how, when FDR told the bankers to either find a way to regulate themselves, or he would see the government put something into place for that, which created the Securities and Exchange Commission. Would it be possible for the sports betting industry to set up its own agency board to help it keep some rules in place for betting to leverage in some ways against self-destructive gambling binges? It's an old social problem, always showing at some level in history, so even if there is a large effort to prevent it, almost certainly this kind of entertainment will still happen in most of the larger cities. It's not really as grave in most case studies as other kinds of co-dependency behavior patterns often are. It gets more social media time simply because it's easier to write this content in the old morality narrative mode for general content publishing that is safe material to distribute, and it does not actually compare in net value to more completely addressing other kinds of compulsive addictive conditions having toxic effects upon families and society today. Why corporations like publishing so much about the cleaner moral debates, and they run away from questions like those in the Epstein files, is hard to explain simply. And yet, probably much more time will be spent writing about the moral problem of sports betting than these other issues of greater value to take on than this one really is.
> This makes me think of how, when FDR told the bankers to either find a way to regulate themselves, or he would see the government put something into place for that, which created the Federal Reserve Board
The FRB was created in 1913 under Wilson, rather than FDR.
Oh, that's right, it was Woodrow Wilson who said that thing about rules for the big banks! LOL! Sorry, I'm over 70 this year, and some of the names and places are not recalled so perfectly. The warning was a precursor to the SEC, not the FRB.
I’d say medicalization — framing gambling as an addiction — pushes policy toward treatment and restriction, and because sports betting is new it’s easier to outlaw before it’s culturally embedded like other vices . Put together, portraying gamblers as vulnerable and betting firms as exploitative turns a clinical frame into an egalitarian, anti‑corporate case for bans, so this looks more like a continuation of a regulatory trend than a random exception.
Last time I checked, sports bookies are mostly banning competent gamblers and only allowing innumerate gamblers to play. In your own terms, banning sports betting is adaptive for societies because it’s a zero sum or typically negative sum use of money
There's also the question of *which members* of society are most engaging in the negative-sum betting, what they'd be doing instead if sports betting were not as easily available of an option, and whether their own past or future or counterfactual selves would agree with their present self's choice to so engage.
It's our present self that always gets to choose among available choices in the moment. But our past selves were similarly free to take actions in which they could choose to alter what those available present choices are, and to consider what our future selves would want those choices to have included, in so altering.
I agree, this is something Robin Hanson understands perfectly well in so many other contexts. In fact he routinely seems to assume most people share or endorse such understanding, and express surprise when they don't react well to proposals he makes that rely it.
Probably as a kind of imperfect commitment mechanism. We see an activity where people tend to express a desire to do less of it when in far mode than they actually do when in near mode -- in other words it shows hyperbolic discounting -- we reasonably suspect that people are acting in utility negative ways.
Some kind of truly effective system where people could sign up to prevent themselves from gambling (eg to remove yourself from the ban list requires taking action months before you are removed) or to impose dollar limits on themselves might be preferable if we could make it work. The difficulty is that implementing it is difficult because it requires people verify who they are and raises concerns about people placing bets for others. But I still think would be a good idea.
I believe some states do have this for casinos but not in a very effective or advertised form.
> We see an activity where people tend to express a desire to do less of it when in far mode than they actually do when in near mode -- in other words it shows hyperbolic discounting
I don't think that's actually the same thing as hyperbolic discounting. The latter is a kind of time-varying (hence inconsistent) time-preference, while the former is a "wanting to want" kind of different thing. Per Hanson, "far mode" is more a matter of signalling.
There is an implicit assumption in there that when we talk about what we would like to be doing in the far future we are working in far mode while when we act immediately we are in near mode. I agree that may not always literally be true but I do think it tends to be the case.
But no, far and near mode aren't per se about signaling -- they have relations to that but they are broad modes of thinking.
Sports betting is unlike the lottery, or casino games, in that the outcome can be thrown by the participants. According to Gemini in the U.S. there is 8x greater volume of bets on the big four leagues than there are salary payouts to athletes. At some scale there is an obvious moral hazard to collude.
Casinos/lotteries can also be rigged, although since unlike sports leagues they already take a cut, their temptation is lower.
Great article :)
I think a big difference is that sports gambling seems to be fine for most people but extremely harmful to a small subset of people.
While this can be true if dating and financial markets - those have strong upsides.
Alcohol is the most similar case where it has harmful and concentrated downsides but I think it is less extreme than gambling. (I for example would prefer if a loved one had an alcohol addiction rather than a gambling addiction).
This argument is clever on the surface but fundamentally unserious. It reduces a complex, evidence-rich problem to a taxonomy of “pleasures,” while ignoring the defining characteristic that distinguishes modern gambling from most other indulgences: it is a designed extraction system, not merely a discretionary pastime. The claim that sports betting is just another harmless pleasure disintegrates under even modest empirical scrutiny. For a more rigorous treatment of the issue, see my analysis here: https://mdarwin.substack.com/p/the-corrosion-of-civilization-sportsbooks?r=706cmj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I think you are incorrect to classify drug bans as being about physical harm, and that drugs are the right comparison for sports betting. Drugs cause physical harm primarily to the people who choose to use them. All the other physical harms you mentioned are non-consensual. And it's really only the non-consensual physical harms that we ban, as shown by the fact that we only ban corporal punishment in the context of disciplining a child, not in the context of BDSM.
I think the reason we ban drugs is more about the addiction - people who use drugs tend to re-orient their motivation systems around the drugs to such an extent that they destroy their lives, and often the lives of those who depend on them. And we are seeing the same harms with sports betting.
It's a tell about a latent predatory market people feel uncomfortable naming because of its relation to incendiary scientific topics considered taboo amongst common people
Sorry, this is going over my head. Can you give a clue what you mean?
gambling tends to harm people's circle: parents, spouses, siblings, children. it's an easy way to lose a lot of money on nothing.
>Yes, sports bets can waste time and money, but so do a great many allowed pleasures.
Most of those don't tend to be obviously destructive. Alcohol is of course a notable exception, and perennially a popular ban candidate, but those bans usually end up even more destructive.
Spanking & corporal punishment don't fit well in that list. They aren't classed as "pleasures" usually, but instead means of punishment.
I have noticed that a lot of the people who are unhappy about the rise in sports betting also dislike the legalization/decriminalization of marijuana, certain places decriminalizing hard drugs, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and permitting the homeless to take up valuable public space at the expense of the rest of the population. Rather than an "exception", I'd say it's a kind of heightened backlash against a larger trend.
The usual argument is that some bad people get pleasure from punishment, and so we want to show we aren't those sort of people.
I don't think that's the "usual argument".
Why ban? Because we can.
People want to believe that their sports winners are merit based, bets taint that perception
Social behavior models over the decades have researched the issue of compulsive behaviors associated with attention detraction as a method of social awareness, as a social-exchange theory in Kelley's theory of what the self gives up for what they get back. Watching and engaging in a social experience of talk with similarly interested personalities around a mode of entertainment, baseball, football, and others, where the exchange is emotions of positive arousal when you win the betting pool before others in that social group, gives narrative to the rationalization of what you get in exchange for the money given into the bets. Aaronson and Bandura, along with others, find that certain personality types find this process especially attractive as a habit. Whether science can say there is a neuro-hormonal trait associated or, more significantly, a social development history in early childhood is not yet very clear, but a group has always shown somewhere in a city that engages in a habit of some kind that we can generally refer to as sports betting. Other examples where money crisis happens in society are alcoholism, drug addiction, and compulsive sexual over-reaching in social expression. Local and eventually state and national law will try to help manage a crisis where persons suffer and cause social harm to others associated with them, because of anti-social habits. But it does seem that the level of political capital in social media content around sports betting has more to do with how easy morality story narratives are written that are socially digestible to the general public on this one, compared to the more ugly, destructive, codependent habits like STD spreading, hyper-sexual over-reach expression, or bodies found to be dying horrifically at the street curb in the city. The writing and opinion publishing social media industry finds the content easy to write and rarely complain about much upon reception in the general public, and the story will sell the magazine or other venue as a writing product. I can see why others say making some kind of rules for this entertainment activity to prevent binges might be a good idea. If anything in particular is enough to detract from that happening, it is probably the cost of administration for it. This makes me think of how, when FDR told the bankers to either find a way to regulate themselves, or he would see the government put something into place for that, which created the Securities and Exchange Commission. Would it be possible for the sports betting industry to set up its own agency board to help it keep some rules in place for betting to leverage in some ways against self-destructive gambling binges? It's an old social problem, always showing at some level in history, so even if there is a large effort to prevent it, almost certainly this kind of entertainment will still happen in most of the larger cities. It's not really as grave in most case studies as other kinds of co-dependency behavior patterns often are. It gets more social media time simply because it's easier to write this content in the old morality narrative mode for general content publishing that is safe material to distribute, and it does not actually compare in net value to more completely addressing other kinds of compulsive addictive conditions having toxic effects upon families and society today. Why corporations like publishing so much about the cleaner moral debates, and they run away from questions like those in the Epstein files, is hard to explain simply. And yet, probably much more time will be spent writing about the moral problem of sports betting than these other issues of greater value to take on than this one really is.
> This makes me think of how, when FDR told the bankers to either find a way to regulate themselves, or he would see the government put something into place for that, which created the Federal Reserve Board
The FRB was created in 1913 under Wilson, rather than FDR.
Oh, that's right, it was Woodrow Wilson who said that thing about rules for the big banks! LOL! Sorry, I'm over 70 this year, and some of the names and places are not recalled so perfectly. The warning was a precursor to the SEC, not the FRB.
I’d say medicalization — framing gambling as an addiction — pushes policy toward treatment and restriction, and because sports betting is new it’s easier to outlaw before it’s culturally embedded like other vices . Put together, portraying gamblers as vulnerable and betting firms as exploitative turns a clinical frame into an egalitarian, anti‑corporate case for bans, so this looks more like a continuation of a regulatory trend than a random exception.