Discussion

Sports Betting Is Everywhere, Especially on Credit Reports

jackconsidine: Very interesting. Would love to see comparisons with LV where sports gambling has always been legal (relative delinquency rates to other states before the ‘18 ruling, especially in the u40 group). Also change in delinquencies in LV as a control (presumably flat)

erulabs: 0.5% increase in credit delinquency rates over 3 years feels... underwhelming.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.

iambateman: I mean…keep reading.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?

remarkEon: I was surprised by that too, but maybe we're too early. It's hard to put a precise point on it without hard data, but it just feels like gambling was better when you could do it in two places (Vegas, Atlantic City, maybe to a lessor extent at the horse track) and you had to actually travel there to make a big show of it. And you also felt a little bad about it.When I turn on sports today it's just in your face gambling all the time. I think we'll come to regret this.

originalvichy: I’m waiting for this to affect more young men from my country of Finland.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.

umanwizard: Why don't you say what country you mean? Sorry, but just writing "in my country" and leaving everyone else to guess is an internet trope I find very annoying.

ralusek: That feels like it wouldn't provide a useful comparison, because the people who were going to bet on sports when LV was the legal place to do it, would go to LV to do it. Their delinquency rates wouldn't necessarily be reflected in LV, though, since they've come from elsewhere to do it.

parthdesai: Sports betting is regulated, prediction markets aren't though. That's a pretty stark difference

snthpy: I agree. Ban the advertising and promotion of it, like we do for cigarettes, because the industry is really predatory, but leave people the choice.

iambateman: They buried the lede…Participation in sports betting appears to make people about 2x more likely to be delinquent on their loans.Whether you think that’s “bad enough” is another question, but the article doesn’t make it very clear what the effect size is.

acomjean: As Comedy Central put it. “Sports, brought to you by gambling”. I don’t disagree but it’s enmeshed now and will be hard to control. Leagues kept their distance because it looked bad, but now seem to embrace it as it must generate a boat load of ad revenue.

Jcampuzano2: I personally don't participate in it and don't really find it interesting at all. For the longest time it was fairly normal to bet among friends, but I do know some people who seem to obsess now over sports betting to what feel like unhealthy levels.I really don't care and I'm definitely on your side where I think people should be allowed to do what they want in this regard.The crossing of line for me though is that this is now being advertised on TV and practically everywhere and being normalized for children and teenagers.Call me a cynic, but I think the real goal in the long term for these companies is to get people addicted to it and to normalize it from a young age while they're more impressionable and thats where I believe the true harm is.

julianozen: I wonder if this is just selection biasPeople who are bad with money are bad with money

itsthecourier: there is a book. addiction by design, exactly about this.most of betting houses depend heavily on problem gamblers, I will look for some stats, but the truth is regulators don't care or have controversial ties very often

nofriend: It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went. If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal. I personally think it would have a high bar to overcome.

zoklet-enjoyer: Here's the justification; it's my money and I'll spend it how I like

pinkmuffinere: 0.5% total increase seems pretty small to me too. I'd be interested to see the rate of change though, it's possible that it will keep increasing linearly for a while as it gains more social acceptance. Or maybe this is the steady state value, in which case, I think I agree with you.

eru: Nicotine is actually good for you (at least no worse than caffeine). It's all the other stuff in tar that's bad for you. And that part of the smoke is bad pretty much whatever you burn.Vaping avoids most of that.

eru: Well, at least you'd want to be careful about correlations vs causation, yes.

eru: Well, 'sports' itself is predatory and causes lots of young people to trash their health for the amusement of onlookers.I say 'sports' to mean the stuff people watch on TV and in stadiums. You going for a run or kicking a ball with friends is fine. It's audience-driven sports that are bad.A bit of betting is small fry by comparison.

eru: There's plenty of regulation around them. But sure, you can ask for even more, or different regulation.

eru: > If it's going to be made legal, it needs to be justified, rather than there needing to be justification for making it illegal.Huh, why?> It was banned most everywhere, then with no public debate on the subject, much less consensus, all of a sudden it was legal and in your face wherever you went.They didn't change any laws, did they? So it was as legal earlier as it is now, isn't it? It's just that someone found the right loophole that was always there.

rmunn: Percentage increases, and the phrase "X% more likely", are usually quite ambiguous. I wish more people would tell you whether they mean absolute or relative increases. E.g., if (numbers made up for example) 0.5% of the general population are delinquent in credit, but 1% of gamblers are delinquent, then you could report that as either a 0.5% increase (absolute) or a 100% increase (relative). Which one people choose often has a lot to do with the impression they're trying to give: are they trying to panic you, or give you actual facts?And knowing the baseline of a relative increase can matter a lot. If something goes from a 0.001% to a 0.002% chance of happening, that relative 100% increase means very little. If it goes from a 50% chance of happening to a 100% chance, that same relative 100% increase means a lot: it's gone from a coin-flip to a certainty.

Alive-in-2025: We have many restrictions on what spend our money on. You can't buy illegal drugs, you can't pay someone to kill someone else. You can't buy many different substances without permission of the govt like certain explosives. Some states have limits on buying (or using) lockpicking tools (often called pick lock tools in the law) unless you have certain permissions, like being an active locksmith.So we have limits on what you buy. Also you can't buy booze if you are underage. You can't buy a gun without a background check.

gotwaz: It takes a village. Especially if the problem is systemic and not just the individual. When you count the number of people with some addiction or the other the total represents how many people havent found anything better to do within the system. Thats like finding cells in your brain that are busy looping randomly not fully attached in some useful way to the system. Ofcourse you can zap them and isolate them or remove them but the imaginative solution is reattach them and make them useful to the system in some way. Cause the brains that do will have larger capacities and capabilities than brains that dont.