A growing body of evidence shows sports gambling is hurting Americans.
Writing in The Atlantic last week, Charles Fain Lehman said,
The evidence is convincing: The betting industry is ruining lives.
Over the weekend, millions of Americans watched football. They cheered, they ate, and—more than ever—they gambled. The American Gaming Association expects $35 billion in bets to be placed on NFL games in 2024, about one-third more than last year’s total.
If you follow sports, gambling is everywhere. Ads for it are all over broadcasts; more than one in three Americans now bets on sports, according to a Seton Hall poll. Before 2018, sports gambling was prohibited almost everywhere. Now it’s legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia, yielding $10 billion a year in revenue.
Readers may be quick to dismiss these developments as harmless. Many sports fans enjoy betting on the game, they say. Is it such a big deal if they do it with a company rather than their friends?
A growing body of social-science literature suggests that, yes, this is in fact quite different. The rise of sports gambling has caused a wave of financial and familial misery, one that falls disproportionately on the most economically precarious households. Six years into the experiment, the evidence is convincing: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake.
Lehman is not alone. Research is making it clear that sports gambling is anything but a good bet.
Studies indicate people who gamble on sports may be twice as likely to suffer from gambling problems.
Young men are particularly hurt by sports gambling. Twenty-year-old males account for approximately 40% of calls to gambling addiction hotlines. Upwards of 20 million men are in debt or have been in debt as a result of sports betting.
And the Arkansas Problem Gambling Council says it has seen a 22% increase in calls for help with problem gambling — a spike largely driven by sports betting.
Sports betting is out of hand, and some gambling companies have actually produced ads that seem to promote problem-gambling behavior — like commercials that show people so fixated on sports betting that they ignore everyone else around them or ads encouraging people to take every opportunity to gamble.
In light of all of this, it seems accurate to say that sports gambling is “ruining lives.”
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
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