The legalization of sports betting makes divorce more likely. That’s the takeaway from a new study produced by West Virginia University economists Brad Humphreys and Jane Ruseski, with a co-author, Alvaro Muniz Fernandez, at the University of Oviedo in Spain.
Scary stuff.
And while I’m not going to sit here and pretend I can out-argue researchers who do this for a living, I do want to push back.
Let’s start here: In the states that legalized sports betting, divorce went down after legalization. Not up. Down.
So how do you get “betting causes divorce” out of “divorce went down”? The researchers argue divorce in betting states should have dropped even faster, because it dropped faster in the states they used for comparison. The whole study is the gap between “fell a little” and “fell a lot.”
That’s a legit way to run this kind of study, at least according to my few minutes of research. But it means the entire thing hinges on which states you compare against each other. And that’s where it can get a little messy.
Utah, New Jersey. New Jersey, Utah
The comparison leans on states that hadn’t legalized betting by the end of the study window, a group that includes Utah, Texas, Alabama, and a chunk of the rest of the Bible Belt. These are not places like New Jersey and New York. Different religions, different ages, different economies. The study is sort of asking what New Jersey couples would have done if they acted like Utah couples, and the scary headlines ride on that being a good guess.
Then there’s the actual financial part, which is where the study puts its eggs. Sports betting leads to financial woes, financial woes lead to divorce. Sounds reasonable, until you look at how money actually ranks when people explain their reasons for divorcing.
There’s plenty of research built around exactly this idea. Sonya Britt and Sandra Huston at Kansas State University found that fighting about money is a strong predictor of an unhappy marriage, but a much weaker predictor of an actual divorce. They note that almost no research backs the popular belief that money is the No. 1 cause of splitting up. In one survey they cite, financial problems came in 13th out of 18 reasons people gave.
A National Fatherhood Initiative marriage survey landed in a similar spot. Divorced people were read a list and asked to check the major reasons their marriage ended. Top three: lack of commitment, too much fighting, infidelity. Money ranked well down the list. The report says it “was not often chosen.”
So even if betting does empty the wallet, the next link in the chain — money trouble leading to divorce — is weaker than you’d think.
Questionable results
And the foundation under all of it is worth a look too.
This latest divorce study sits on top of, and cites, earlier research arguing that betting wrecks people’s finances, specifically a Northwestern study on disappearing savings and a UCLA study on credit scores and bankruptcies. Good bricks to build on, except the bricks have already started to crumble.
Michael Mandel, chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute, told me last fall those studies got caught up in the pandemic, when savings spiked and crashed and the federal government pumped trillions into the economy, and some of what looked like betting damage was really just COVID noise. His own analysis found sports betting states compared favorably in bankruptcy rate changes to the country overall.
To be clear, sports betting does real financial damage to some people, and that issue is worth taking seriously. But “it’s coming for your marriage” is a story this study doesn’t quite finish. Divorce actually went down in sports betting states. The comparison group could definitely be seen as a stretch. And when you ask people why their marriages have ended, money tends to land near the bottom of the list — never mind sports betting, which nobody’s checking off on a survey anyway.
Sometimes, a scary headline is just a scary headline. If I were smarter, there’s even a causation/correlation sentence to be had somewhere.
