We’ve written about this before, for example:
2022: Again on the problems with technology that makes it more convenient to gamble away your money
Corbin Smith shares some new stories on the unfortunately topical subject of gambling addiction and how it relates to the financing and the sports media. In his article, Smith implicitly makes a strong case that to understand the problem you need to think about interactions between psychology, economics, and politics. The sports, news, and entertainment media are pushing gambling so hard. I guess that in the future we will look back on the present era and laugh/cringe in the same way that we laugh/cringe at the “Mad Men”-style drinking and smoking culture from the 1950s.
I find it interesting how different cultures frame and name gambling. In English, the word gambling comes from the same root as game, which refers to the thrill of it all. If you translate the German word for gambling into English, you get ‘Glücksspiel’. Luck has a positive connotation in this context, as the word can also be used to describe chance, happiness, fulfilment or good fortune.
I have a friend who fell into a deep, dark hole when his gambling addiction, coupled with his depression, ruined what little domestic life he had after coming to Germany from an Eastern European country. I am happy to report that after years of struggle he has finally come out on top. So I prefer the way the French talk about gambling, calling it jeu d’hazard, the game of danger.
Aleatory pursuits.
I think you mean “jeu de hasard” which means just “game of chance”. In fact the first entry for “hasard” in the Le Robert dictionary reads “(old) dice player”. By extension “hasard” can also have the meaning of “risk” in French but it’s secondary.
> the first entry for “hasard” in the Le Robert dictionary reads “(old) dice player”
Correction: “(old) dice game”. I got confused because at some point the word hasart designated both the game and the player.
Carlos Ungil is right to correct my spelling (jeu d’hasard with an s). According to Wiktionary (my go-to dictionary for the origins of sayings and words), hasard means chance, risk, or hasard, but is derived from the Arabic word for a game of dice.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/hasard
I’m not sure if your rewriting of “jeu de hasard” as “jeu d’hasard” is intentional but in principle the contraction is not possible in this case (although rules are not always followed): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_h
I had a look at the French grammar rules and it seems that I must have missed the part about the h aspiré😅 I could have sworn that my French teacher from Cameroon years ago did not correct me when I used that phrase with a contraction. Then again, he may have let it slip to concentrate on the parts that violated* his ear even more, as there were plenty of other things to correct in my speech. Thank you again for the correction, Carlos Ungil!
*There is really no other word to adequately describe the relationship between the way an inexperienced student speaks and the ear of their language teacher.
I love these comment threads!
I have a lot of mixed feelings about gambling. On the one hand, the government shouldn’t be going around punishing people for betting $20 or even $200 or $2000 on the outcome of sports events or whatever. On the other hand, organizations and the people who run them who actively target gambling addicts should have meaningful consequences for doing that, and families injured by that should recover full compensation. So I think to the extent we want laws on these topics, the laws should be about ensuring the casinos are run in a fair, open, equal, and non-predatory manner (offering the same odds to all players, actually paying out on winnings, open standards for advertising odds online, etc). We could perhaps include a requirement for disclosure of net worth and income statistics from the govt to participate as a player, and rules that automatically limit your annual gambling to some fraction of net worth per year without licensing or something like that. If people want to go into gambling as a profession and risk meaningful fractions of annual income or net worth (say 10% or more) they could do so in a licensed manner. If they want to drop $2000 which is 2% of their annual income on the superbowl… well that’s up to them.
Unfortunately, people who write laws are rarely at all quantitative. Often they write things in terms of dollars. For example the constitution in the 7th amendment guarantees you a right to a jury trial for questions larger than $20, an amount of money I found on the street the other day (rather than explicitly fixing this, the court has just kinda patched it over). Running a Jury trial costs society hundreds of thousands. All economic costs are opportunity costs, the marginal federal case you could have seen instead of a $20 jury trial has to average at least $100k. Just the jury alone could typically make $15k in wages for even short trials.
Jury trials are a fraction of all cases, but they should probably be a larger fraction. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/there-any-way-resuscitate-seventh-amendment-right-jury-trial this article goes into some examples of why that doesn’t happen and how dollar cap limits on trials are often broken (because at some point in the past people thought a cap of $2M is a perfectly fine number for maximum damages, but years later it’s just not enough and real damages can easily exceed that).
Anyway, lawyers take note. If you’re going to write laws make them dimensionless and quantitatively meaningful for all time.
I’ve just spent a few minutes looking at Pubmed entries under gambling disorder. The quick executive summary is that gambling is common all over the world with problem gambling occurring in about 1-2% of players. In teens, gambling often happens online since casinos in most places ban minors. Again, about 1-2% are characterized as having a gambling problem. There is no longitudinal information on the teenage gamblers that I found.
Our culture clearly romanticizes gamblers. Bret Maverick is cool. The old and the more recent Ocean’s Eleven make it look good. Even Dostoyevsky’s gambler has romantic success. Obviously, gambling is just a fact of life.
It doesn’t help that one of the US’s best-known election forecasters is going around telling everyone to view their actions in terms of making bets!
Some business school professors claim the average credit score deteriorates by .3% in states with legalized gambling. But that does not show cause and effect. I don’t think it even shows that gamblers are the ones with deteriorating scores. Maybe states with deteriorating economies are the ones that legalize sports gambling.
https://bretthollenbeck.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/hollenbeck_sports_gambling.pdf
Another recent paper finds that sports gambling “magnitudes indicate that legalization produces an unconditional increase in average household betting deposits by about $25 per quarter.” Unfortunately, they can’t measure offsetting decreases in illegal sports gambling at local and offshore bookies.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4881086