[dijit]

I think it's a fair rationalisation, but what you're missing is the perhaps thousands of very poor people who give you a large portion of the little they have.

Of course this looks like almost nothing on a margin sheet, but it's still lives that are destroyed.

You could argue that it's their money, their choice, but gambling itself always sells better to poor people, the hope that their luck could change and they'd be out of poverty.

Some companies (perhaps not yours) target poor people specifically with their marketing and messaging.

Betfred/PaddyPower in the UK for example are almost exclusively located in deprived areas, in fact you can usually tell the economic status of a section of city by how many WilliamHills and PaddyPowers there are.

[MexicanJoe]

It's true and possible. I worked in e-commerce before and you could argue, that I was optimizing our conversion rate, so more people would buy more shit they don't need. They should spend their money on their kids instead. That is a valid point of view but that is just most business.

[Tarsul]

there is a difference between these types of addictions. Granted, someone might be "addicted" to buying clothes/shoes/etc. but that person won't take debt to try to get more shoes, whereas an addicted gambler might just do it to get his money back... also, nowadays, with a smartphone always ready, gamblers have less options to avoid their addiction (whereas with casinos they could ask to be blacklisted. Also they always had to go there, which takes time and effort. Taking the smartphone does not. A very small lapse of 5 minutes can lead to losing a lot of money. Also with internet ads they really can't escape nowadays.).

Still, it is a legal business so basically it appears as if (in a working democracy) the community has decided that gambling is ok overall. (personally, I'd like more regulation because the benefits of gambling, which is taking money from addicted people with basically no value add, do not outweigh the costs)

[peyton]

They’re poor, not stupid. They know what they need to survive. The absolute number of people “destroying their lives” in this manner is very small. This disconnected brand of pauperate paternalism is very degrading.

[vintermann]

The number of people seriously harming their lives with gambling is not small. And it's not just poor people.

People know what they need to survive, but they don't just want to survive for survival's sake. There has to be something actually living for. When those things for various reasons seem hopelessly out of reach, you will usually gamble in one way or another. It's natural to take chances when playing things safe will lose you the game.

Ironically enough, games are a great way to illustrate this and think about it. Let's say there's a game where you roll a die four times after each other, and the goal is to get a sum higher than 20. For every roll, you can pick a regular die, or you can pick one which has one side show 8, and all the other ones 1. The regular die has better expected value, but the optimal strategy incorporates the other die.

Gambling companies seek out people who feel (rightly or not) that they've rolled a 1 on their first roll. And they offer them what seems like a chance. But we should give people in that situation a better option, damn it.