If you’ve watched almost any major sporting event in the past five years, you may have noticed the inescapability of sports betting. Ads for sportsbooks like FanDuel or DraftKings are everywhere: on the sidelines, at half-time, and even in the talking-head commentary on ESPN. Roughly 4 in 10 Americans now bet on sports, and the industry is pulling in over $10 billion per year, with room still to grow.
This is all a remarkable sea change from 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down a 1992 federal ban on sports gambling in all but a few states. Today, 38 states and the District of Columbia have created sports gambling markets, with most other states looking to follow suit.
Very little is known about the social impact of this rapidly growing industry. But two recent working papers shed new light on what the spread of sports gambling has done to American households. The picture is not pretty: the rise of a new, highly addictive, straight-to-your-smartphone commodity has caused a surge in bankruptcies, bank overdrafts, and debt collections, concentrated among those households least able to afford them.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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