> Gambling thrives in contexts where a ladder to success doesn’t exist or is perceived as not existing.
This is a neat moral message… but is it really true? Gambling is addictive, so the reality might be that even without such deep social problems you get similar levels
Brenner, Brenner, and Brown wrote A World of Chance in which they draw from large reams of data and conclude that gambling is often used by those that see no other way up.
It can be a bit of both no? Drugs are addictive but drug use increases when conditions worsen.
Gambling is addictive for some, in the same way that alcohol is addictive for some, yet blanket alcohol prohibition is not considered a great idea in hindsight.
I don't know how we could put limits on gambling that would make sense, though. There's a huge difference in bets that I used to make (which were all black-market sports bets, usually on 'game winner' or over/under) ~ once a week during the NFL season vs. the shit going on with FanDuel and all these phone-based gamified services. And that stuff absolutely encourages you to make bets that you can't afford and can easily turn into a problem even for someone who isn't 'addicted' per se -- it's like the predatory loot box model from video games.
TLDR I don't know how you write a law that would put hard and fast limits on what can be bet on and how much an individual is allowed to bet during a week in a way that would be palatable to the companies. I'm in favor of the blanket ban at this point; the black market for betting has always existed and it was better than the current setup.
I think banning or severely limiting advertising similar to cigarettes would be a good start. Stop having sports broadcasts be so intertwined with gambling, seeing odds on the screen when watching sports is gross.
You could make it so that if someone called the gambling hotline then they automatically are suspended from betting at all sports books for a year or something. Idk if this is the perfect policy but it took me about 5 minutes to come up with it.
The smartass but not wrong answer is to check rates of gambling of India when the caste system was at its strictest or in Soviet Russia. If the answer is no without major effort into suppression it may be a counter example.