What to do about limbic capitalism

Here’s another article about the growing evidence that legalized sports gambling has a lot of bad downstream effects. One effect that’s not mentioned is how annoying gambling advertising is to sports fans who don’t gamble, as I can attest from personal experience. Another thing that isn’t mentioned is that legalizing sports gambling greatly increases the odds of game-fixing scandals (Soon there will probably be prop bets on when the next one is going to happen).

This is all related to something I mentioned a few months ago, which is David Courtwright’s concept of limbic capitalism. Basically, addiction produces tremendous profit potential for those who can exploit it, so, in a society where money is basically God, enormous amounts of talent and energy go into figuring out ways of creating more addicts, and then exploiting their addictions. (This is what smart phones are becoming).

I don’t think there are easy answers to this, since the drawbacks of prohibition are well known. An interesting stat in this regard is that, immediately after nationwide prohibition went into effect, alcohol consumption went down by about two-thirds, then gradually climbed back up to around 60% to 70% of the previous baseline. Of particular interest to me is the estimate that, post-prohibition, consumption levels remained at around the 60% to 70% of pre-prohibition baseline for several more years, before gradually climbing back up to the baseline level.

I do think that modern information technology creates special reasons for concern, since it’s becoming so much easier to target potential customers/addicts, and then “leverage” their addiction as they say in the business schools, although probably a bit more obliquely than that. I heard an interesting talk the other day about how Only Fans is doing this with the various fetishes etc. of its customers, and ultimately the algorithms are going to be everywhere.