Life, Liberty, and the Over Adjusted to 38.5 Parlayed with the Money-Line

America’s disastrously dumb decision to legalize sports gambling is already causing enormous harm nationwide. Sports gambling “does not displace other gambling or consumption but significantly reduces savings, as risky bets crowd out positive expected value investments. These effects concentrate among financially constrained households, as credit card debt increases, available credit decreases, and overdraft frequency rises.”

Sports gambling leads to “a substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies. We also find that financial institutions respond to the reduced creditworthiness of consumers by restricting access to credit.”

“When sports gambling is legalized, the effect of NFL home team upset losses on [intimate partner violence] increases by around 10 percentage points. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that these effects are larger: (i) in states where mobile betting is legalized, (ii) in locations where higher bets were placed, (iii) around paydays, and (iv) for teams who were on a winning streak.”

But I’m interested here in a slightly different question, which is what the trend says about the badly broken analytical models and habits of mind that have led our technocratic elite to the point where they would sign off on such immiseration. And where better to look than The Economist, where your one thing to read this week is, “America’s gambling boom should be celebrated, not feared.”

We could spend this entire discussion on just the subhed: “The gambling frenzy is mostly about people being free to enjoy themselves.” Pause for a moment and think of the most recent frenzy in which you found yourself involved. Would you say it was an instance where people were mostly enjoying themselves?