Sports betting is everywhere, especially on credit reports

I'm not a gambler and I personally find gambling morally questionable and intellectually embarrassing, but golly I'm tired of sports gambling being pointed in a sort of "see, freedom doesn't work!" sort of way.

1% of people will ruin their lives no matter what society does to prevent it. If you have a gambling problem (if it even appeals to you), I would as a _friend_, recommend you seek help; but as your fellow citizen? Up to you.

Decades of a government monopoly on gambling was dismantled, and the market is being opened up for foreign companies buying licenses to operate.

It feels like there is a global wave of reintroducing every ”vice” that was somehow curbed with laws and restrictions. Nicotine? Cigarettes were so expensive that young people didn’t even bother, until snus, vapes and nicotine pouches (especially the pouchess) took off, and now more young people are hooked on nicotine than ever, and even younger.

Light alcohol beverages were only sold through supermarkets, and the wines and the stronger stuff through the well-equipped national monopoly. Now home delivery and breaking up the monopoly is on the table. Ever stronger stuff is getting moved to supermarkets instead of liquor stores.

Now gambling is next. It’s so bad that even the great Apple Inc. includes betting odds by DraftKings (it says so on the app) on their Sports scores app that’s rated ages 4+. You literally have to go to the app settings to turn them off.

All these rollbacks are made by economically right wing parties in the name of personal liberties. Oddly enough, as with many such reforma by the economic right, the gains are personal, but the losses are collective. Billions of euros a year go into fixing the negative effects of alcohol and nicotine. I’ve no idea about the numbers for gambling, but at least the revenues from the government monopoly funded NGOs and other public services directly.

It’s increasingly maddening seeing imperfect solutions to terrible human problems being replaced with… nothing. Nanny state laws might not work, but neither does my alcoholic neighbour… or my old high school friend, who lost so much money gambling that he refuses to find work, because the debt collectors taking a majority of his paycheck. They have more freedom now, at least.

Edit: Looks like you edited your comment to say Finland. Thanks!

As for the content of the comment, I totally agree. I think the eroding standards of regulation of addictive substances (and addictive behaviors like gambling or social media apps) is a serious mistake that we will come to profoundly regret.

For the affected population, it’s around 10 percentage points—or double.

So people who sports bet are twice as likely to be delinquent as those who don’t. I’ll give you that the effect is smaller than I expected.

Here’s the thing though…it’s not like that trend is slowing down. The finalization of prediction markets and continued normalization of betting as a pro-social behavior is currently headed to the moon…so we should ask if it’s causing major side effects.

Smoking makes someone 25x more likely to develop lung cancer. Right now it looks like sports betting makes you 2x more likely to be delinquent on your car loan. At what incidence does that become anti-social enough to try to curb?