Note: This entry continues my discussion of Timothy O'Brien's December 21 op-ed, published by Bloomberg Opinion. The first entry regarding this subject was my January 1 "Good" Addictions versus "Bad" Addictions.
I guess I had a problem right off the bat with the title and the sub-heading. "Will Sports Gambling Foster Addiction?" came first.
When these anti-gambling pieces show up during Christmas shop-a-mania gluttony, I always want to sub in other consumer choices. "Will Buying a New Chevy Foster Addiction?" or "Will Buying Steak Dinners Foster Addiction?" or "Will Buying New Underwear Foster Addiction?" The answer to all of these questions is probably yes, so why focus on one choice, sports gambling, out of many?
Then the sub-heading, "Most people wager online purely for fun, but millions are vulnerable to financial and social misery." Hoo boy. I have umpteen issues with that line. First of all, how does Mr. O'Brien know that "most people" wager online "purely for fun." That's a lot of conjecture for one sentence. Maybe everybody wagers, at least in part, due to addiction. How does Mr. O'Brien possibly know that they don't? And I'm not even going to get into definitions of "fun" and "misery," which are problematic trigger words without clear definitions in the real world, to say the least.
And then we have the "but millions are vulnerable to financial and social misery." If you plug any expenditure, like "most people order fast food online" or "most people shop for real estate online" or substitute anything for "wager," then the "millions are vulnerable to financial and social misery" could conceivably follow no matter the particular expenditure named.
Most consumerism fosters more consumerism of the like. The measure of addiction isn't whether a recognized cottage industry has sprung up to identify it or whether it's in the DSM-5. The measure of consumer addiction is whether a behavior leads to repeating the behavior. People scream wolf to call out overspending on gambling, while pooh poohing overspending on everything else.
More than 70% of Americans die in debt, and the average debt is more than 60K. That's the frame in which American consumer decisions are made. What has led us to this American reality has little to do with gambling, and certainly not much to do with sports gambling. Every caveat Mr. O'Brien mentions for sports gambling in this piece could be applied to all consumer goods, services, and experiences. Certainly Mr. O'Brien is aware of that, but he chooses to not mention it.
Affleck Effects
I could go line by line through Mr. O'Brien's piece and deconstruct most of the points. Maybe I'll do that later in the year as an exercise. For now, I want to address the curious opening with the name "Ben Affleck" as the first two words, followed by the line, "the movie star and avid gambler who has struggled with alcohol addiction."
Using Affleck's name to open the piece is a helluva hook, but it's really a cheap shot. If you're going to make the scientific case for cross addiction relevance (gambling and alcohol), then go ahead and make it. Don't just insert a line about Affleck's self-reporting that he's an alcoholic for no good reason. The implication of that line is that Affleck's alcoholism somehow directly relates to his sports gambling front man work. The line is clearly meant to suggest that there's a problem with Affleck promoting sports gambling BECAUSE he's an alcoholic. Well, if you're going to make that case, don't go halfway. Let's see some stats. Get into the reputational mud and explicitly argue your point. Don't just imply something and walk away.
Mr. O'Brien is usually a fine writer, but this was a cheap opening hook with an even cheaper implication. Worthy, really, of The Weekly World News.
If I were Affleck, I would be enraged by what amounts to an irrelevant opening cheap shot as a way to sell a piece. I suppose Affleck is familiar enough with the travails of print implications lacking facts, but I suspect Bloomberg Opinion as the source was a bit of a surprise.
Bob Dietz
January 8, 2022
