The myth of the online gambling ‘epidemic’



Politicians and pundits have found a new social menace to fret about: online gambling. Some even compare its growth to an “opioid epidemic.” But alarmist rhetoric often obscures more than it reveals.

A new study by Douglas Walker of the College of Charleston and Brett Evans of Georgia College dismantles many of the claims fueling this moral panic. The authors find that much of the fear surrounding online gambling rests on weak evidence and flawed research methods.

Legalization didn’t create onlinegambling. It merely brought an existing market into the open, where it can be monitored, taxed, and regulated.

Walker and Evans examined the academic literature most often cited by anti-gambling activists and found “implicit anti-gambling biases, flawed research methodologies, and unsubstantiated conclusions.”

The result, they argue, is a distorted public perception of an industry that has become both mainstream and heavily regulated.

A case study in statistical gamesmanship

The researchers focus on three papers that critics routinely cite to show that legalized sports betting harms society.

The first, from the University of Oregon, claimed a link between sports gambling and intimate partner violence. The authors found that violence increased in cities where local NFL teams lost as betting favorites. But the same study failed to mention that violence decreased — and by a larger margin — when those teams won as favorites.

Since favorites win more often than they lose, the Oregon study’s framing was, at best, misleading. By focusing narrowly on “upset losses,” the authors turned an isolated pattern into a sweeping conclusion. Walker and Evans note that such selective reporting suggests an intent to produce a politically useful result rather than an accurate one.

Confusing deposits for debt

A second paper — beloved by anti-gambling commentators — claimed that online gambling depletes household savings. Yet it defined all unresolved bets as losses, even when the bettor eventually won. The study also lumped sports betting with online casino gaming, which has existed far longer, and ignored daily fantasy sports altogether.

Its data failed to mention that the median sports bettor wagered only $750 over 12 months — about $62.50 per month. That hardly supports the picture of mass financial ruin.

Ignoring the market that already existed

Like so many policy debates, this one forgets the black market that thrived long before legalization. Critics assume online gambling barely existed until states sanctioned it. In reality, the American Gaming Association estimates that Americans wagered $64 billion through offshore sites in 2024 alone.

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Legalization didn’t create gambling. It merely brought an existing market into the open, where it can be monitored, taxed, and regulated.

Correlation without causation

A third set of studies blames sports betting for macroeconomic trends such as rising bankruptcy and delinquency rates. Walker and Evans point out that such research often mistakes timing for causation. States typically legalize gambling or lotteries when budgets tighten or economies falter. The economic distress comes first; gambling reform follows.

Recent years have included two divisive presidential elections, a global pandemic, and disastrous public policy responses — all of which distort economic data. Yet many academics pin every fluctuation on gambling laws.

As any freshman statistician knows, correlation does not equal causation. But for activists chasing headlines, correlation is good enough.

The return of the prohibitionists

Walker and Evans don’t romanticize gambling. They simply urge policymakers to weigh evidence honestly and to resist moral panics. Moderation is the sensible course.

But prohibitionists in public life rarely settle for moderation. They prefer sweeping bans that spare them the hard work of assessing trade-offs. As Prohibition showed a century ago, banning a popular activity doesn’t eliminate it — it just drives it underground.

Online gambling deserves scrutiny, but it also deserves truth. Demonizing it with sloppy statistics or ideological bias serves neither public health nor public honesty.

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Fake money fuels real pain as elites cash in and families fall behind



Think for a moment about the “speed of life.” Two centuries ago, it took months to cross the Atlantic on a wooden ship. Today, it takes five hours by plane. The Pony Express once needed weeks to deliver a message. The telegraph shrank that to seconds.

Human ingenuity has always accelerated life, but it was still bound by reality — the limits of earth’s raw materials.

On August 15, 1971, America traded reality for illusion.

Technology built from those natural parts is real, sustainable, and grounded. But when systems detach from the real world, they become artificial. They may run for a time, but they cannot endure.

Now consider money as a form of energy. Once, it was tangible: gold coins, silver dollars, bills you could hold in your hand. Even when transactions became electronic, they were still tethered to reality, with gold as their anchor. Cotton became fabric, chickens became food, gold became money. Nature set the limits.

That changed on August 15, 1971.

Faced with economic pressures, President Richard Nixon severed the dollar from gold. In doing so, he handed America’s financial energy supply to the Federal Reserve and the political class — a system now untethered from nature. Money no longer reflected real value. It was conjured from nothing. Now the government, once dependent on the real economy, had the power to create its own artificial economy.

You can’t print money to pay your bills. You live in reality. Washington escaped it — at least temporarily. The result is a false economy where the supply of “financial energy” outruns the natural world.

The treadmill effect

That’s why ordinary Americans feel like they are running on a treadmill that only speeds up. The $37 trillion in so-called “debt” isn’t debt at all. Debt requires repayment. It is the measure of money created out of thin air. When fake energy collides with real commodities, prices rise.

Look around you. Everything in your home — your chair, your phone, your groceries — is either a commodity or built from one. Oil powers the machinery that produces and delivers them. Since 2000, the cost of commodities has risen about 8% every year. Wages, in contrast, have only risen about 3% annually. That gap explains why families can’t keep up, why the middle class shrinks, and why frustration mounts. And because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, this inflation doesn’t just punish Americans — it ripples out to every nation on earth.

The burnout economy

Think of the human body. It runs on about six volts of electricity. Plug it into 220 volts and you’ll get incredible output — briefly — before the system burns out. That’s what the Federal Reserve and political elites have done to our economy: forced humanity into hyper-speed, compressing decades of natural economic activity into a few frantic years. The result is burnout — social unrest, inequality, rage, endless wars, and declining health.

Even environmental strain ties back to this misalignment. Artificial money fuels artificial demand, driving overproduction and overconsumption. Elites congratulate themselves for “managing” the system while ordinary citizens pay the price — in higher bills, weaker wages, and a constant sense of instability.

This was not inevitable. For nearly two centuries, the dollar was worth 100 cents, because it was tied to gold. Today, it’s worth about three cents. The rest has been stolen — not from us, but from the future. Tomorrow’s dollars are being dragged into yesterday’s spending. But eventually, nothing will be left to plunder. That is the endgame of artificial money: a collision between illusion and reality.

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Most Americans don’t fully understand this, but they feel it in their bones. They sense that something is wrong, that they work harder only to fall farther behind. Artificial money creates artificial problems — and artificial problems have no real solutions. Only a reckoning with reality can set them right.

Reclaim reality

Elites in Washington and on Wall Street will not save us. They are the ones benefiting from the distortion. The rest of us are left to adapt. For many, that means simplifying life, rediscovering the virtues of family, community, and localism — the parts of America still tethered to reality. In the countryside, where life is slower, you can still glimpse the America that once was.

On August 15, 1971, America traded reality for illusion. The day Nixon closed the gold window, government and elites unshackled themselves from the limits the rest of us still live under. Until we recognize that truth, we will keep chasing solutions to problems that can’t be solved — because they were never real to begin with.

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