How to dull the lure of sports gambling
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 62/100
Several U.S. states are taking steps to address the rise in gambling addiction. Preventive education could help shift the focus from the ‘troubling illusion’ of luck to the importance of individual agency – and restore players' and fans' joy in athletic competition.
| Heather Khalifa, AP Former NBA player Malik Beasley, center, leaving the Brooklyn Federal Court after pleading not guilty to charges related to sports gambling, July 1, New York. Loading...
Consider this sum: $166 billion. That’s how much Americans spent on sports betting in 2025.
For comparison, this amount far exceeded the combined revenue of the U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries, according to a Fortune magazine report published Sunday. And it’s about 33 times the value of bets placed in 2017, the year before the U.S. Supreme Court removed federal restrictions on sports gambling.
Before that, as writer McKay Coppins pointed out in The Atlantic a few months ago, gambling had been highly regulated and generally discouraged in the United States. What he called a healthy social stigma around the practice was “rooted in millennia of accumulated wisdom” – from thinkers such as Aristotle, who saw it as an impediment to an ethical life, and George Washington, who linked it to inequity.
Yet today, untold thousands of Americans confront gambling addiction and related financial losses. A New York Federal Reserve study published in February found that sports gambling is associated with a “roughly tenfold” increase in bettors’ spending and increased credit card and auto loan delinquency.
Local officials and concerned citizens are urgently exploring responses to this challenge in ways that balance government’s oversight and public safety roles with the exercise of individual rights of choice, judgment, and responsibility. In this effort, they might be able to build on American public opinion: In 11 states, sports gambling is still not legal. And a Gallup poll recently found a sharp decline since 2022 in the percentage of Americans who view gambling as morally acceptable.
This month, a bipartisan commission in Pennsylvania issued a report calling for quick action to address the gambling industry’s negative practices, including misleading marketing. Other states are conducting gambling prevention education programs in schools and colleges. And in June, Colorado passed a law that prohibits credit card funding of bets, and bars companies from marketing to those under 21 years of age.
“This law puts guardrails on an industry that has ballooned,” according to state Sen. Matt Ball, a Democrat from Denver who was a co-sponsor of the bill. “That growth has come at a real cost – to families’ financial security, to kids’ well-being, and to the integrity of the games we love.”
Sports analysts believe gambling is damaging trust in games and fans’ delight in honest competition. In Mr. Coppins’ own one-year reporting experiment with sports betting for The Atlantic, he found the experience to be socially isolating rather than bonding and joyful. “Gambling,” he wrote, “atomized us ... into a hyper-individualized, every-man-for-himself portfolio of micro-bets.”
To gambling’s many critics, a lasting solution for this urge toward microbetting or trying to game the odds requires a shift away from the popular belief in chance. That shift would not just save money that might otherwise be lost; it could also restore a sense of initiative and hope in the ability to shape one’s life.
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“Luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion,” one that needs to be outgrown, according to philosopher Steven D. Hales of Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. In a 2020 book, he wrote of “cleaning our mental house of dusty old concepts” such as luck and chance. Doing that, he wrote, “is liberating. To give up luck is to regain our own agency in the world.”
As more states rethink legalized betting, they seek not only to prevent harm from gambling but also perhaps to renew the ethic of success by merit, talent, and hard work.
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