Casinos like to say that roughly 2% of players become addicted. What they fail to mention is that approximately half of all their revenue comes from these 2%. A more telling statistic is that approximately 10% of players account for 90% of all casino revenue [1]. The numbers are quite similar for games with IAP [2].
While every casino in the US displays signage claiming to support "responsible gaming" and claims to have policies in place to stop addicts from gambling, the reality is that if addicts were stopped, all casinos would be closed and bankrupt within a month. No capital-intensive industry could survive if 90% of their revenue suddenly vanished. And with that, we arrive at the truth: casinos are built explicitly for the creation and exploitation of addiction.
This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal. The only meaningful way to address it is to focus resources on treatment and prevention.
> This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal.
You could make this exact same argument for liquor sales.
The top 10% of regular drinkers have 10 drinks a day. If they reduced their consumption to that of the next decile, total ethanol sales would fall by 60 percent.[1]
We tried banning alcohol sales. It didn't work very well.
>We tried banning alcohol sales. It didn't work very well.
That might be persuasive if it were the only relevant information we had. But most US states maintained a complete ban on gambling for most of their existence, and those bans worked pretty well.
The alcohol ban might have worked prior to automobiles. Maybe the gambling ban only worked prior to the internet, at least until there was federal and not state level action on going after online gambling.
> We still don't culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing. You don't see the states advertising vodka like they advertise the lottery.
I'm having a hard time with this. Something doesn't have to be endorsed by the state to be culturally embraced, which seems to be what I'm understanding when I view both sentences in tandem. Apologies if I'm getting that wrong.
But if I view the first sentence in isolation:
> We still don't culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing.
I'm still baffled, but for different reasons. Alcohol is endorsed, celebrated, and embraced from top to bottom in nearly all corners of contemporary society. It's served nearly everywhere, consuming it is the cultural norm, not consuming it is viewed with suspicion, it's lauded as being crucial to one's enjoyment of an evening, social gathering, sporting event, flight, etc. Entire business models exist that would otherwise be unprofitable if not for alcohol sales. Many establishments are essentially loss leaders but for their alcohol sales (which are supposedly tangential to their primary business offering).
2.5 million deaths are alcohol-related every year. It's a factor in 40% of all violent crimes. 24% of incidents involving police have alcohol as a factor.
And yet, sit around at dinner with a group of guys and order a soft drink, and it's often viewed as abnormal behavior.
Why? Because, for reasons passing understanding, we culturally embrace alcohol as a good thing.
According to that article, 4% of Americans drink 10+ drinks per day. I find that very hard to believe, and it's certainly something that requires credible sources.
You're welcome to download the data set from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions if you want to check the math. The NIH makes it publicly available.
In tandem with looking up the data, I also recommend broadening your social circle by meeting a former alcoholic or two. They're not hard to find. Alternatively, you can read their memoirs, which are even easier to find.
I don't recommend the alternative of seeing some of your friends or relatives drink themselves to death, even as their own closest friends fail to see what's going on. But you don't always have a choice. Sometimes the anecdotes find you.
Anecdotes aren't data, but they are what human beings are designed to believe. If you have trouble envisioning evident facts that are backed by piles of data, perhaps you need to collect a wider range of anecdotes.
Regarding the 2%, you're assuming that the data from Bwin - an Internet gambling site - is representative of the casino industry as a whole.
And that 10% account for 90% of revenue doesn't mean that those 10% are addicted. There's obviously a long tail of people that only enter a casino once a year or less, which will obviously contribute little to its revenue. That doesn't mean semi-regular players must be addicted.
I don't doubt that there are addicted people, but I don't agree that the data you mention indicates a large problem.
The numbers in land based casinos won't be identical, but they are close enough. Having looked into this issue, the data (not just from these two sources) is rather conclusive that the vast majority of casino revenue comes from problem gamblers, despite the fact that only a small percentage of their customers fall into this category.
Furthermore, there's a strongly canted wealth distribution curve already built into society. A few uber-wealthy people gambling at high but still "recreational" levels would skew the statistics this way.
More information is necessary to establish this claim.
If you gamble regularly and lose money regularly, it's very likely it's addiction that's bringing you back.
It's hard to be a "healthy" semi-regular losing player, the ones I can think of off the top of my head are people with good jobs who hit the casinos a few times a month as a social event and lose what they would have spent at a bar anyway. They may drop $500 each per month, but the problem gambler may drop $10k in a week. It doesn't take many problem gamblers to get to 90% of the money coming in.
Why do you say it's hard to be a semi-regular losing player? Besides the millions who player in lotteries (which is not the same, granted), my experience is from Spain, where many bars and coffee shops have slot machines (like this[1]) and you see lots of people playing for 5-15 minutes and then leaving.
Wow, that picture is not something that happens in the U.S.!
I think it's hard to be a "healthy" losing player because there aren't many good reasons to keep doing something that's costing you money when the whole point of the activity is to win money. But I suppose if you're always within 5 minutes of a slot-machine that changes things a little.
Here in the U.S. gambling is heavily regulated so unless you live unusually close to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, a Native American reservation, or other small areas where it's legal it takes a lot of effort to get to a casino. I don't really know but I'd guess that most people here are an hour or so from the closest legal gambling, and there are even states with zero legal gambling.
> it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal.
It's quite a complex issue. How do politicians regulate games without infringing on players' freedom? How do they discern lawful play from illegal play? Treatment, prevention and awareness is the only practical solution.
> How do politicians regulate games without infringing on players' freedom?
You don't seem to understand that addicts aren't free.
If, as downandout suggests, the industry can't exist without the addicts, then the choice isn't one of freedom versus tyranny. It's a choice of which infringement on freedom we find worse: a predatory industry ruining people's lives or the state saying, "Sorry, you can only play games for fun, not money."
> You don't seem to understand that addicts aren't free.
Yes they are. Quit trying to overload the term. Are they slaves? No. Are they in prison? No. Freedom means the freedom from the tyranny of others, not from yourself.
I find myself agreeing. Psychological addictions are a real problem, but not one that I am comfortable involuntarily treating, so long as they do not directly harm other people.
On the other hand, I am in favor of regulation sufficient to make the worst-case-scenario equal to the worst-case-scenario of unemployment. The real social problem is only externalized beyond individual and dependents when the stereotypical problem gambler starts seeking lines of credit to further their addiction; This is to be avoided at considerable cost, because not only are their incentives compromised in a manner associated with addiction, but also in a manner associated with fear of whatever private sticks their patrons have to get them to repay the debt, and they have no legal means to do so.
This is a pretty low-empathy position. You're basically saying that exploiting people for profit is ok as long as it only harms those directly exploited plus their dependents.
I don't necessarily think we should ban anything that people could get addicted to. But I'm generally in favor of stopping people making money off of addicts. And I'm thoroughly in favor of banning people from trying to create new addicts. As an example, I think the cigarette advertising bans, mandatory on-pack warnings, and high cigarette taxes are swell.
I'm saying that there are desirable limits on how much a free society constrains voluntary behavior. Cigarettes are physiologically addictive on a separate level from psychologically addictive gambling, or psychologically addictive pornography, or psychologically addictive exercise, or psychologically addictive knitting, or psychologically addictive excessive work ethic. You can find people obsessed with any activity on Earth. It's a very rough ride trying to define a pathological level of each of those activities, and then intervene when that level is reached, with the full power of the state, against participants with no desire for an intervention.
I don't disagree that there are desirable limits. I disagree that physiological addiction to nicotine is societally more harmful than gambling addiction.
I also think there are things to do other than "intervene [...] against participants with no desire for an intervention", so I think that's a bit of a red herring.
Oh hey, I didn't notice you had been elected Grand Poobah of English last week. Sorry.
Your use of "freedom" is one meaning, but it's not the only one, or even the main one. Note, for example, that the phrase "freedom from addiction" has 129,000 hits, and there are dozens of books with titled related to the phrase. Similarly, people talk of slavery to their addiction: E.g.: http://www.thehopeline.com/17-lows-of-addictions-part-2/
If you talk to actual recovering addicts, their experience is one of freedom. And they're not misusing the word; Webster's first definition is "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". That is distinct, in their view, from your definition, which they have next: "liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another".
Considering that the state saying, "Sorry, you can only play games for fun, not money." will lead to the creation of a black market and a whole lot of actual crime in addition to the victimless crime of gambling, I think it's pretty clear what the only reasonable and sane option is here and history has proven it over and over again.
Could you give some examples of the historical horrors of black market slot machines? I'm not familiar.
Also, I don't know that we have to ban gambling. I don't think people having the occasional poker game is a big problem. It's industrial-scale exploitation of addicts that I take issue with. I think it would be sufficient to ban profiting from gambling.
There isn't examples of black market slot machines but there are a lot of examples of black market gambling which ruins lives worse than legal gambling does.
My experience is with 3rd world countries, specifically Thailand, where gambling is illegal. I know you're not advocating for a ban on gambling but I think it's worth a mention that due to its illegality, there are widespread issues that stem from it: corruption, cops being in on illegal gambling dens, and mafia / gangs that sprung up to run these under ground dens.
Aside from the more organized underground gambling, there are also smaller village style gambling where within a village / town / city, there are bookies that will collect your bet (and people bet on anything: soccer being the main one.) Basically addicts will find a way to gamble whether it's banned, discouraged, organized, or legalized.
In the case where it's illegal, the creditor who the addicts borrow money from are usually loan sharks or gang members that take extreme means to recover any money they can. Many families lose homes, life-savings, or even get killed. So it gets pretty bad, IMO it's worse than a legalized gambling system.
People who wants to gamble prefer to go to the legal means as it pose much lower risk of extreme repercussions... but if it's not legal, some of them would still find a way to gamble. This may mean that the number of people who do gamble reduces... but I'm not sure by how much and whether that ends up tipping the scale in favor of a ban.
I think there's a big difference between moralistic approaches and harm-reduction approaches. Honestly, I couldn't give a shit if people gamble. I just care about the harm of addiction.
So as far as I'm concerned, gambling should be legal, as I don't want addicts to ever worry about coming forward. And if somebody wants to be the office bookie as long as he pays out every dollar he takes in, hey, have fun. But the moment somebody has a profit incentive to hook people and keep them hooked, I think we've created a very dangerous situation.
This part, though, I take issue with: "Basically addicts will find a way to gamble whether it's banned, discouraged, organized, or legalized." That's somewhat true for addicts not in recovery. But I think it ignores people in recovery, those getting started on recovery, and those with addictive potential who aren't yet addicts. For those people, availability all matters a lot.
We've managed to reduce smoking a great deal without black-market tobacco farmers springing up. There's no reason we can't do something similar with other addictive products.
I was actually thinking outside of slots. A lot of gambling practices are still illegal like sports betting in most of America. Such illegal gambling often leads to some sort of organized crime around providing loans and the actual gambling service itself. But I was also thinking of alcohol prohibition in the 1920's and the current drug prohibition. The black markets that these events created are not that dissimilar from the one around gambling and the core cause is the same.
I do think that eliminating the profit incentive is something that could work. The profit from gambling is cited as a redeeming quality, however, as a reason for legalized gambling to exist. The overwhelming idea, at least in the US, is that if people are going to have a vice (or fun, depending on your perspective), their activities should be taxed so that others (corporations and the government mainly) can profit from them. Perhaps if the money actually went to fund schools and other things that benefit society, I could get behind this viewpoint, but regardless of the claims of governments that have legal gambling, it doesn't. This John Oliver segment about it is pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=789&v=9PK-netuhHA
I think that the moralistic desire to control citizens (as we see with alcohol and drugs) is a pretty different thing, with pretty different effects, than we see with harm reduction strategies (as with cigarettes).
I definitely agree with you that the society-benefit line is mostly a sham. With cigarette and alcohol taxes, the general goal is to discourage consumption. But many US states actively promote gambling, so I think it's a very different thing.
I empathize with your frustration toward the gambling industry.
However, It's not only about the slot machines. You can find the underlying model in many other products, like freemium apps. There's much more subtlety than closing down casinos. Illegal businesses – which don't employ workers nor pay taxes – would likely exploit the new prohibition and its victims.
> "Sorry, you can only play games for fun, not money."
Addiction-prone individuals will still be unable to function normally in day-to-day life. That's why I believe that treatment, prevention and awareness trumps other obvious proposals.
> Addiction-prone individuals will still be unable to function normally in day-to-day life.
[citation needed]
> That's why I believe that treatment, prevention and awareness trumps other obvious proposals.
That's a couple of different kinds of false dichotomy. Nobody is saying one can't have treatment, prevention, and awareness while also, say, placing such heavy regulation on gambling that the amount of addiction is minimized. As a comparable model, look at cigarettes.
I enjoy playing summoners war, but recognize it as basically a slot machine. There are people on there who clearly have spent a LOT of money. I've chatted with a few of them (the largest that someone admitted to was $5,000), and most of them claimed to be well-off enough that it wasn't an issue. One claimed to be the son of a successful investment banker. One was from China and said he doesn't even know how much money they have, but they always have plenty. Nobody I talked with has been all like, "yeah, i am hurting myself and racking up debt, but I just can't stop"
Of course, if you assume even half of those people are lying, that's where the addiction is. You'll tell yourself stories and tell others stories, so they don't see you as a weak person.
Your supposition is that the casino industry adheres somewhat to the Pareto principal. This is neither surprising nor dispositive of its dependence on addiction, a term that you neither define nor measure convincingly here.
I agree on the purpose of casinos, but I fail to see how it's evil to give people what they want and what they would seek out and do on the black market anyway if it wasn't legal. Just because they're legal doesn't mean that we can't focus on treatment or prevention. Keeping casinos legal removes a lot of the other problems that illegal gambling brings. Basically, by keeping gambling legal the damage that gambling does can be minimized and generally limited to the gambler. Once you make it illegal and bring in the black market, while gambling itself is a victimless crime, the industry that now supports it illegally is not. Same as any other industry that deals with highly addictive things that people have immense desire for.
You seem to assume that because people spend a hell of a lot of money they are necessarily addicted. This isn't so, a lot of these people just have a lot of money (e.g many of the whales that spend a lot on IAP for free-to-play games are rich saudis).
> 10% of players account for 90% of all casino revenue.
You're suggesting that this is unusual but it's just the Pareto Principle, which applies to... pretty much every set of data ever, and serves as no evidence for anything.
I'm not against what you are saying, but you need to find a better argument than this.
While every casino in the US displays signage claiming to support "responsible gaming" and claims to have policies in place to stop addicts from gambling, the reality is that if addicts were stopped, all casinos would be closed and bankrupt within a month. No capital-intensive industry could survive if 90% of their revenue suddenly vanished. And with that, we arrive at the truth: casinos are built explicitly for the creation and exploitation of addiction.
This is pretty evil, but it will continue happening as long as politicians can be bought to keep it legal. The only meaningful way to address it is to focus resources on treatment and prevention.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023046261045791233...
[2] http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-12-12-monetizing-...