Bad Bets

Few social changes have come with the swiftness and lack of opposition that mass gambling liberalization has. As recently as 2017, most forms of wagering were forbidden or heavily regulated at the state level. But the moral force behind such regulation had long since collapsed; the Supreme Court in 2018 gave the rotten edifice of anti-gambling law a final and apparently decisive kick by overturning the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), which had frozen the spread of state-level sports gambling legalization. A 2022 Pew Research study found most Americans indifferent in the face of broadly legalized sports betting, with almost one in five adults saying they had actually placed bets in the past year.