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I do not have the brain chemistry for gambling. If I bet my house on a coin flip and won, I would be a sleepless wreck for weeks anxiously wondering about what would have happened had I lost. (Like tobacco, this is one of those Latter-day Saint rules I would keep even if I left the Church).<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps because of this, the idea of a gambling addiction, where people destroy their lives because they need the next hit or are trying to get back to even, is very viscerally unpleasant to me (which makes gambling addiction-centered films such as <\/span>Molly\u2019s Game<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>The Gambler<\/span><\/i> [preferably the 1974 version, which is based on Dostoevsky\u2019s novel of the same name] and <\/span>Uncut Gems<\/span><\/i> very intense for me), and I am glad that Utah is one of the most anti-gambling states in the country. I usually bristle at the reflexive Utah=Latter-day Saint connection that many draw, but in this case it makes theoretical sense that Utah\u2019s anti-gambling is in part derived from its Latter-day Saint heritage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Recently due to a Supreme Court decision the floodgates for sports gambling were opened across the country, and many states liberalized gambling laws. They did this in a staggered fashion, which makes it so that researchers can more rigorously draw causal conclusions about what happens when sports gambling is legalized. <\/span>A recent paper<\/span><\/a> that just dropped found that when online sports gambling was legalized they \u201cfind a roughly 28% increase in bankruptcy likelihood and an 8% increase in debt collection amounts, both statistically significant\u201d among other financial problems. (Standard caveat, I haven\u2019t done a super deep-dive, critical analysis of the methodology, but on a quick read it seems to hold up).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Not to get too political, but while like many white men of a certain age I had a youthful dalliance with the seductive edginess and moral parsimony of libertarianism, as I\u2019ve gotten older I\u2019ve realized life and society is more complicated, and now I\u2019ve become the suffragist in a petticoat marching against demon rum. But even if your libertarian sentiments make you hesitant about banning or regulating sports betting, there is absolutely no reason for the state-run lottery, and I am proud that Utah is one of a very small handful of states that do not have a government run lottery, and that it is probably in large part because of our faith.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n