Addiction Markets

The problem isn't the 70M people who placed bets, its the ~25M with broken risk aversion.

These are mostly men, and a very specific type of men. You can try to curtail their access to gambling but we're missing the underlying problem.

Has society ever addressed an underlying psychological problem successfully?

Because when it comes to the underlying psychological causes of homelessness and drug addiction and school shootings and violent extremism my impression is we don’t really do much.

I'm an optimist at heart, but this subject is dear to me, and my opinion may seem pessimistic: the short answer is, no, it cannot be fixed at any large scale, at least not in a lifetime.

Large-scale societal change requires generations of work, indeed. That may be disheartening, but it is the way it is, and we should continue to work toward those changes.

Anti-Smoking, especially in teenagers, seems to have been successful.

Vaping is counteracting that somewhat. (There's the perception among many kids that vaping is deeply uncool – and they'd be correct – but that's not something we can rely on.)