Nate Silver: belief

Transcript context

…Sure, but what’s the utilitarian price of being a libertarian? Look, I think most of the studies on gambling say that it’s a good transaction in terms of people getting some degree of enjoyment and excitement out of it, but maybe you have 5 percent of the population that becomes very addicted, and that 5 percent can account for a large share of volume. If it were me, if I were the gambling czar, I would probably ban slot machines and let everything else go, more or less. The utilitarian part of me for slot machines is maybe enough to outweigh the libertarian part. They are deliberately designed to be addictive. It’s not very transparent what the odds actually are. You can’t actually go and it doesn’t say you have a -9 percent ROI at this particular slot machine. If you look at the demographics of slot machines, it’s much lower income. Sports betting and poker, which are the two forms I participate in myself, are mostly done by fairly high-income people who can, I think, afford to lose, but slot machines are nasty things. Speaking of scale, if we put you in a time machine, send you back to 1970, and you’re playing poker, why exactly is it that you would win so much?…

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