What should we do about sports betting (and other fun stuff)?

California ballot propositions should make us take a step back

A child stares addicted-ly at his phone in a menacing and misleading advertisement for you to vote no on Prop 27. (Source is noon27.com)

As tradition demands, this coming Election Day, Californians will go the ballot box and vote directly on extremely consequential ballot propositions.

Two of these propositions surround the legalization of sports betting: Proposition 26, the Legalize Sports Betting on American Indian Lands Initiative, and Proposition 27, the Legalize Sports Betting and Revenue for Homelessness Prevention Fund Initiative. If you want a more detailed description of what these propositions do, I highly recommend the California government’s description of the two propositions, but the quickest summary is that Prop 26 legalizes sports gambling in person at racetracks and tribal casinos and Prop 27 legalizes sports gambling online anywhere where there is internet. Because Prop 27 is much more far-reaching, I am going to be mainly focusing on it.

Just like many past California ballot propositions, Prop 27 is a big deal, not just monetarily but also culturally. Legalizing sports gambling on the internet will make a lot of people a lot of money, and having tens of millions of Californians able to gamble will certainly affect the way sports are marketed and understood in California and nationwide. Moneyed interests are aware of this, which is why nearly $500 million has been spent on the race. For comparison, that’s around double the most expensive Senate race ever, which was Jon Ossoff’s 2020/2021 defeat of David Perdue.

But, while many California proposition races are decided by where partisan interests align, this race does not have all the partisans lining up on consistent sides. A few mayors of cities that would be considered very big anywhere other than California (Oakland, Fresno, Long Beach, and Sacramento) have endorsed Prop 27, even though one of those is a Republican (Fresno mayor Jerry Dyer) and the rest are Democrats. On the No side, you have extremely powerful state senators and state representatives, including the President Pro Tempore of the State Senate (a Democrat), the Speaker of the State Assembly (also a Democrat), and the minority leaders of both the State Senate and the State Assembly (both Republicans).

To make things even more complicated, both the Yes side and the No side are flooding Californians with purposefully confusing ads. Here’s one from the No side which is clearly meant to make you think kids will be able to gamble, even though it will be impossible—the gambling company has to take your Social Security Number and verify you are 21. On the yes side, here’s one targeting liberal Californians that pretends like the proposition is about native sovereignty and here’s another from the yes side that pretends like the proposition is about homelessness and mental health support (why would DraftKings and FanDuel be spending tens of millions on homelessness or tribal sovereignty when they are in fact gambling companies?).

But I think the fact that Prop 27 has turned out to be both nonpartisan and opaquely marketed allows us to take a step back and ask ourselves where we stand on sports betting and other similar vices and why.

Definitions, then some of my rules

However interesting I think sports betting is, I think we can even broaden the topic to a certain kind of vice where the following things are true:

1. Lots of people find it fun

2. It is really hard or impossible to die from it both quickly and directly

3. A decent number of people get addicted to it

4. It’s basically harmless to everybody who doesn’t use it, except if they love you and care about you and you are one of the ones who got addicted to it

I think using this definition allows us to discuss sports betting in the same category as alcohol, marijuana, and pornography but without having to also lump in prostitution (the prostitutes are usually hurt by it) and hard drugs (which are extremely easy to overdose on and die).

And for things in this narrow category I have just created, I think a few rules apply that help me think through how to view these things, especially on a policy level:

1. Fun is good, and it’s a worthy political project to increase the amount of fun had by the population

2. Prohibition and/or regulation can work, to a certain extent

3. Some people can’t handle it and become addicted, and if we can use regulation to keep a lot of the fun, while also helping the addicts, that would be awesome

And to defend these rules,

Fun is good

This may seem obvious because it is obvious at a personal level when deciding what to do on a Sunday. But I think it is also true at a political level, where it is not obvious, and I do think there is a political level to fun and the societal increasing of it.

First off, you have parks, libraries, beaches, and other public amenities that we have decided are worth public dollars basically entirely because they are fun. There is no other reason I am glad there were many parks nearby when I was growing up than the fact that it was really fun to go to them. California has beaches that have to be public—that’s so rich people don’t buy up all the fun.

There is also a growing movement which is kind of centrist in nature (but also a little right-wing) that has begun to recognize and lament a certain segment of the liberal/left which has become obsessed with making sure people don’t do certain fun things. That tendency of the liberal/left spectrum is loosely connected to safetyism and helicopter parenting, but it’s also at the same time its own thing which involves trying to deplatform comedians for saying funny stuff that some people find offensive, telling people what cultural items they can and can’t enjoy or partake in, or obsessing over power dynamics in unquestionably consensual relationships. The movement to counteract this liberal/left tendency involves a number of things I can point to, like Noah Rothman’s book The New Puritans (which mentions fun in the subtitle), or this great Palladium Magazine piece about how such liberal/left people conquered Stanford’s social life, or Bill Maher’s frequent rants about how the left hates fun.

And I think these critiques of that segment of the liberal/left are largely correct, and could certainly be expanded to involve lots of things that have to do with our COVID response. One of the great many issues with how young people were treated during COVID was that nobody was really doing any cost-benefit analysis on policies that did not involve measuring up literal numbers of lives. So you had doctors arguing that Black Lives Matter protests could happen because they might save some lives, but playgrounds and basketball courts closed because they didn’t obviously save anybody’s lives. Yes, sure, you could make an argument that less fun means more deaths of despair, and people did, but in many blue places, policymakers were just not persuaded.

And while I think the problem is much bigger on the left, there is also a group of sorta-New-Right commentators and politicians who themselves seem to be anti-fun, whether that involves boycotting watching sports (quite fun) or lobbying against marijuana (also fun) legalization despite its immense popularity.

I would push back against such anti-fun movements on both sides and argue that fun is indeed good, and that we should try to have more of it.

And yet

There will be many many more people addicted to sports betting in California if it is legalized in California. And substantial rates of addiction are true in the other vices I put in the same category (marijuana¹, alcohol, pornography).

And I think to some extent, we all ignore (or maybe just don’t know) how much these sin industries make off of the addicts.

Here’s a chart below from the Washington Post about different percentiles of drinkers.

As the chart shows, the most alcoholic 10% of American adults average 74 drinks a week, or over 10 drinks a day. They also drink three times more per week than everybody else combined. So, assuming their alcohol has the same profit margin as casual drinkers’ alcohol, 75% of alcohol profits come from these addicts while only 25% come from the normal, healthy drinkers.

And I don’t have the statistics for sports betting, but I suspect it’s the same paradigm: the majority of the profits are from the addicts. And that’s a sad reality.

We can do a lot more about addicts when it comes to gambling

When it comes to alcohol or marijuana, you cannot really do anything about the addicts. You could prohibit the drug itself, and that would definitely decrease the amount of drinking/smoking (prohibition decreased alcohol consumption), but short of that, what you end up settling for is training bartenders not to overserve, but I have received such training, and it is clearly a joke. Perhaps you could take people’s ID’s and scan them at every bar to see how much alcohol they have had, but even then, they could always buy some alcohol at the liquor store and binge drink it and if you restrict buying lots of alcohol at liquor stores, then I think you basically end parties, and if you end parties, then that’s no fun, and much of this post was about fun being good.

But while you can’t effectively stop a person from having extremely unhealthy amounts of alcohol, you actually can just stop people from doing extremely unhealthy amounts of online sports betting. Prop 27 legalizes online sports betting, but you’ll still have to give your social security number to the sportsbook. And every time you bet, you’ll have to login and associate yourself with that social security number, and you cannot have multiple accounts on the same platform.

To be specific

So here is what I am proposing: a limit on monthly deposits, set pretty low, perhaps around $1000. Would this prevent a rich person from blowing money they could totally afford to lose? Definitely. Do I care? No. Funnily enough, as I was thinking about this article, I thought I was pretty clever for coming up with this monthly deposit limit, but then I looked it up and it already exists in 3 states. Massachusetts has a limit of $1,000 monthly, while Tennessee’s limit is $2,500 and Maryland’s is $5,000.

But, sports betting is legal in far more than those three states—it’s already legal in 21 states and DC, and it is likely to become legal in four more this year, and maybe even California!

Every state should have the $1,000 limit, or really even lower—almost nobody could healthily hemorrhage more than $12,000 a year on sports gambling, and if they could, I guess I think they should go do it in person and not on their phone; that’s better for the economy anyway.

What if sportsbooks can’t survive once they don’t have the profits from the addicts? Well, I guess then they shouldn’t be around, or they should have higher margins. I enjoy betting on sports from time to time. If you go to a baseball game and you bet $20 on the home team, that baseball game is going to be more fun and interesting—at least that’s my experience. But if that can’t happen without some lower-middle-class person blowing their diaper money on a 12-leg parlay, then so be it.

A non-ramblesome conclusion

I think if you live in California, you should vote yes on Prop 26 and Prop 27. There will be annoying stuff about sports betting being legalized (the ads, the increase in sports commentators talking about it, etc.), but there will also be some more fun in the world and I think that really is worthwhile. Betting some money on a game is genuinely harmless fun in a rich country, and I think that’s nice. That said, I think if you are a California voter and you vote yes on Prop 27 and it passes, you should lobby hard to your state and US representatives about how a low monthly deposit limit should be instituted. Sports betting is fun and unproblematic for most gamblers, but we have a rare opportunity here—because the industry is already online and heavily regulated enough to verify identities—to both satisfy the casual users of a vice, while preventing anyone’s life from being turned upside down by it. That’s really a good thing.

1. Some people (mostly potheads) argue that you can’t be addicted to marijuana. I don’t want to cite studies on this because I think it is so on-its-face-ridiculous. I lived in California until I was 18. I knew many many children growing up who smoked marijuana every day, and I knew several who could not sleep without it. It’s obviously addictive to some extent, and I just know too many people who were or are addicted to it to believe you if you say otherwise, in a science journal or on the street. Sorry.