Americans Question Fellow Americans' Morality

Many.posts have dealt with international perspectives.

Jonathan Evans at Pew: 

Americans are more likely than people in other countries surveyed in 2025 to question the morality of their fellow countrymen, according to Pew Research Center surveys in 25 countries.

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country.

In nearly all countries surveyed, more people say that others in their country have somewhat or very good morals than say their compatriots display somewhat or very bad levels of morality.

The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%).

 

Lobbying, Sports Betting, and the Vitality of Mythical Numbers

 Mythical numbers and graphics distort public policy debates.  Sometimes the distortion is deliberate.  They call it "juking the stats."

A 2018 SCOTUS decision struck down a federal law forbidding state authorization of sports betting,  Then lobbyists went to work.

Eric Lipton and Kenneth P. Vogel at NYT:

Gambling companies and their allies deployed a bare-knuckled lobbying campaign, showering state lawmakers with money, gifts and visits from sports luminaries and at times using deceptive arguments to extract generous tax breaks and other concessions, according to a New York Times investigation. It was based on thousands of pages of documents and communications obtained in part through open-records requests and interviews with dozens of industry and state officials.

Industry lobbyists, for example, dazzled lawmakers with projections about the billions of dollars that states could expect to collect in taxes from sports betting — projections that, at least so far, have often turned out to be wildly inflated, according to a Times analysis of state tax data.

The gambling industry managed to scare state lawmakers into keeping tax rates low, in part by trotting out data about a sprawling underworld of illegal gambling. The Times found that those figures, which suggested that Americans were placing as much as $400 billion of illicit bets each year, were unreliable.

...

Where did the eye-popping figure come from? The N.B.A. and the American Gaming Association identified the source as a 1999 report by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, which Congress created to assess the harms of gambling.

“Estimates of the scope of illegal sports betting in the United States range anywhere from $80 billion to $380 billion annually,” the report said.

In a footnote, the report attributed the range not to an academic study or even an industry analysis, but to an Associated Press article from the month before the report was released. That article, in turn, reported that “commissioners were told” the estimate, though it did not indicate by whom.

A transcript from a commission hearing in 1998 points to the likely source. One of the panel’s commissioners, citing unidentified testimony and staff briefings, said that “there’s somewhere, depending on whose guesstimate you take, within $80 to $380 billion worth of illegal sports gambling.”

Views of Moral Behavior

Megan Brenan at Gallup:

Using birth control, drinking alcohol and getting a divorce remain the most broadly accepted personal moral behaviors in the United States, out of a list of 21 measured in Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll. Conversely, extramarital affairs, cloning humans, suicide and polygamy are viewed most broadly by Americans as morally wrong behaviors.

All but five of these behaviors have been measured since the early 2000s, and Americans have increasingly taken a more liberal view on many of them since then. The latest reading, from a May 1-12 poll, shows that at least 60% of Americans find 10 of the behaviors to be morally acceptable. In addition to birth control (92%), alcohol use (79%), and divorce (77%), sex between unmarried men and women (71%), gambling (68%), smoking marijuana (65%), embryonic stem cell research (64%), having a baby outside of marriage (64%), gay or lesbian relations (63%) and the death penalty (60%) round out that list.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are seven behaviors that fewer than four in 10 Americans deem morally acceptable, including teenage sex (38%), pornography (37%), cloning animals (31%), polygamy (18%), suicide (17%), cloning humans (12%) and extramarital affairs (9%).

The issues that divide Americans most closely are buying and wearing clothing made of animal fur, doctor-assisted suicide, medical testing on animals and abortion. On each, the gap between "morally acceptable" and "morally wrong" views is less than 10 percentage points.

Lobbying and Information: The Case of Gambling

Our chapter on interest groups stresses that lobbies gain influence by supplying information to officials. The Wall Street Journal underscores the point in a profile of Frank Fahrenkopf, retiring as head of the American Gaming Association:

Mr. Fahrenkopf's strategy was to minimize—though, importantly, not to altogether deny—the social costs that many critics had long said accompanied casino gambling expansion.

In the early years of the AGA, he began to push the young industry to fund addiction research and economic studies, creating reams of statistics that he rattled off in the halls of Congress, in statehouses and in pitches to newspapers. He has called his critics "enemies" and aggressively attacked others' research if its conclusions differed from his.

Mr. Fahrenkopf's handiwork resulted in a series of victories as his pro-gambling rhetoric and the industry's political contributions dovetailed with antitax sentiment in many states, which made gambling expansion an attractive way for states to keep their coffers filled.

In a recent interview, Mr. Fahrenkopf said that at his urging, gambling executives significantly increased their political contributions to state and federal politicians. "I indicated to them that they had to defend themselves," he said. "Our job was to have a bigger influence."

...
He said one of his first moves was to point to the tobacco industry as a warning not to go too far in underplaying the negative side of a product.

"I told my board at the first meeting we could not make the same mistake," Mr. Fahrenkopf said. "We knew there were some people who could not gamble responsibly."

Soon after the AGA, Mr. Fahrenkopf set up a research arm that began directing research funds to university groups—totaling $16 million since 1995. The funds have gone to researchers at top U.S. universities. The industry-funded researchers became the main editors of one of the primary academic journals on gambling, while industry executives took seats on the board of the National Council on Problem Gambling, the main national group that advocates on behalf of gambling addicts. (The AGA says the industry funding doesn't influence the outcome of the research.)

The result has been a set of tools that Mr. Fahrenkopf used to emphasize that gambling addiction affects a small portion of the population—often prompting objections from his critics.
"The research they've funded has been good research, but the question is what has been funded," said Henry Lesieur, a longtime gambling-addiction researcher and critic of industry-funded research. "They are not going to fund research that has the potential for being critical of the industry."

Urinals, Casinos, and Lobbyists

What do waterless urinals and casinos have in common? They both illustrate the role of lobbyists.

The Los Angeles Times reports on lobbyist Scott Wetch, who fought a change in the state building code to accommodate waterless urinals, which could save California billions of gallons of water each year.

Wetch is a Sacramento lobbyist for labor unions, and urinals without water pipes would not be good for his clients in the building trades. His campaign to derail the bill shows why he is considered one of the shrewdest operators in the Capitol.

First he played the health card, arguing that mens' rooms would become breweries for pestilence and toxic vapors.

Then he took a more direct approach, reminding Democratic lawmakers that the bill threatened a key constituency — labor — and specifically his client, the California State Pipe Trades Council and its 30,000 plumbers and pipe fitters.

Finally, he splintered his opponents by crafting a compromise designed to appease environmentalists. The revised bill, signed into law in 2007, allowed developers to install waterless urinals. But they would still have to install the pipes, just in case something went wrong.

"It's absurd," said Kevin Dayton, an executive at the Associated Builders and Contractors of California. "Obviously, waterless urinals are a threat to plumbers getting jobs, and, therefore, he worked to make sure the jobs would continue even as the technology changed."

Wetch doesn't really argue the point.

"I do whatever I can," he said, "to give a competitive advantage to unionized employees."

The New York Times reports on KT Lim, a Malaysian billionaire who leads a company called Genting Berhad:

Because casino gambling is highly regulated, the industry has long drawn swarms of lobbyists promising to help navigate state capitols. Casino gambling is banned in New York, with the exception of casinos on Indian land and electronic slot machines at nine racetracks. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has proposed legalizing the industry, though such a move would require action by the Legislature and a referendum.

lobbyists in New York, according to state lobbying records, include Patricia Lynch, a former top aide to the Democratic Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, and Nicholas A. Spano, a former Republican state senator.

The company has also hired Jennifer Cunningham, a close friend of Mr. Cuomo’s, to do public relations work and Bradley Tusk, who was Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s campaign manager in 2009, to assist with planning.
Genting even created an advocacy group called the New York Gaming Association, which is led by another prominent lobbyist, James Featherstonhaugh.

...Stefan Friedman of SKD Knickerbocker, Ms. Cunningham’s consulting firm, said: “We have a proactive agenda that includes building a $4 billion convention center and legalizing table gaming in New York, both of which will create tens of thousands of jobs and generate billions of dollars in economic revenue. We think those issues are important, and we know nothing comes without a lot of hard work.”