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Gambling

The Legalization of Gambling: Its Social Impact

              "For as long as humans have gambled, there has been apprehension about excessive risk-taking and intemperate gambling". The National Research Council.

Neither gambling nor opposition to gambling is a new phenomenon. From their respective
philosophical vantage points, leftist critics have long viewed gambling as
an economic albatross around the neck of the working classes while social conservatives
continue to regard gambling as a moral disease whose painful symptoms
spread poisonously throughout civil society.1 In the mid-nineteenth century, as
prominent a social commentator as Charles Dickens devoted a magazine article to a
critique of gambling (Dickens 1852). A decade-and-a-half later, the great Russian
writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky penned the autobiographical novel, The Gambler (1866),
which grippingly described the psychology of problem gambling. In the modern era,
the tone of the vast majority of media and cinematic examinations is little changed
since the release of the movie The Gambler, a 1974 portrayal of habitual gambling's
disastrous effect upon the life of an otherwise sensible college professor. Such con-cern
reflects gambling's historical role as a popular leisure activity. Indeed, gambling
was widespread in Ancient Rome (France 1902); it was enjoyed 3,000 years ago in
Egypt and more than 5,000 years ago in China. However, what is new is our comparative
ability to assess empirically the arguments both of those who claim that the
costs of gambling outweigh the benefits and of those who conclude that the cost-benefit
imbalance runs in the opposite direction.

At the commencement of this research, our assumption was that legalized gambling
engenders both costs and benefits to the individual and to society. Therefore, the fundamental policy question addressed in this report is whether or not the benefits of
legalized gambling outweigh the costs? Complicating such a...