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.

These gambling businesses specifically target that 25M. You absolutely can make that much harder for businesses to do, and it will significantly reduce downstream misery.

This is the logic behind the war on drugs and we all saw how that turned out. Obviously there's nuance to be had as I think some vices, in both type and magnitude, are worse/more destructive than others. But crusades against vice rarely turn out well. Instead you'll see the same people huddled around in underground betting rooms and backroom card game tables where organized crime or just other muscle-for-hire are ready to break your knees for not paying your debt back.

Dude, the war on gambling was going fine before it was legalized nationwide like 2 years ago. We don't have to have long memories to remember a time before omnipresent sports betting! It was fine!

Fyi, the Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates for sports gambling was decided in May 2018, 7.5 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...