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I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense. People still blow their life savings in casinos, le famous twitter video. If 5x fewer people go to physical casinos, and as a result 5x fewer people blow their savings, does that actually make in-person gambling worth keeping legal? There could be a relative effect, but I'm not sure there is - I could easily imagine the opposite argument, where online gambling, relatively, makes it easier for casual to spend a little, because the friction of going to the place is relatively a higher cost if you only want to spend $20 vs being addicted. Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)
Imo experience with all sorts of addiction has taught us that almost nothing works once people are already addicted, and getting addicted can happen quite easily once you get in contact. If legal platforms block access, the addict will find another way. The key is to generate less addicts in the first place.
Low friction = more addicts = more problems. This is extra true for gambling, since it doesn't get you near-instantly chemically addicted the way some drugs do, it needs some time to be cultivated and re-enforced. If you need to repeatedly, physically go to a casino, people around you will notice, you might have to explain yourself to your partner or parents or close friends, and for yourself it's easier to notice when you start losing significant money. And noticing it early is important to get people to stop before it's too late. If you play on the phone, you yourself might only notice much, much later how much you have played and how much you really lost, and others notice even later, if at all. Not that this is impossible to happen with casinos, it's about the ease it happens with. There's related approaches, such as requiring casinos to change a fixed sum into a number of chips that you play with (which makes it obvious how much lost every time you go) vs just directly playing with cash (easier to lose more than you wanted to play with) or just pay by card (extremely easy to blow a lots of money), or to require limits on how much someone can lose in a specific time frame, and so on. All of these have the purpose to a) give a legal outlet to avoid the proliferation of a black market b) reduce the generation of addicts by increasing friction c) reduce the negative impact of being an addict by making sure you can only lose x money per hour or so spend.
For similar reasons, nowadays I feel like the old approach of having a small amount of a drug being mostly legal or at least not super punished, but if you were caught trading significant amounts you were fucked, was a certain sweet spot. The friction to even start drugs was quite significant. There is an argument to institute a similar ban on gambling, where small-scale private gambling is explicitly legal, but once you do it large-scale it becomes illegal full-stop. You can then still meet with friends and play a round of poker with real money but still mostly low stakes, but you don't get this industrialised pipeline of addict generation we have now.
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Well, the more friction you can place between you and your addiction the better. Yes, people can and do blow their life savings at casinos. But that’s worlds harder than blowing through your savings when the casino is on an always online phone you carry in your pocket. When you have to go to a casino to gamble, you need to get dressed, get your wallet, drive for 10-15 minutes to the casino, walk across the parking lot, into the casino, find a machine and put in the credit card. Those actions probably mean about 20-30 minutes of being able to talk yourself out of it.
This kind of thing in reverse is true of exercising. The more friction between you and exercise, the less likely you are to actually do it. So they advise keeping your gym clothes and shoes on your dresser, having any needed equipment at home, etc. because at every step you can talk yourself out of it. Do I really feel like fighting traffic to get to the gym? And if the answer is anything other than a very firm yes, chances are you’ll be on the couch Motte-posting instead of exercising. Or maybe you want to eat healthier. The standard advice is stop buying junk food and instead buy the healthy stuff. The reason is that inertia will work in your favor here. You’ll be hungry and all the food in your home is healthy, you don’t necessarily want carrot sticks, but getting potato chips means getting in the car, driving in traffic to the store, walking to the chip aisle, buying the chips, paying, driving through traffic back home before you can finally eat them. The extra effort isn’t worth it most of the time, so carrot sticks it is.
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I think the argument is that people who have an edge and are thus gambling rationally are much less likely to be dissuaded than gambling addicts.
Zvi says that the online platforms would be unprofitable without preying on compulsive gamblers, so I'm not sure that this cashes out to a difference in worldstate.
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