[dalerobk]

A Historical Perspective on Gambling

I just finished watching Rep. Leach’s CSPAN interview and I would like to make a few points. First, I want to say that I’m a professional historian and am currently finishing up my dissertation (at a major research university) on the history of lotteries in eighteenth-century France. As a professional historian who studies gambling, I have read much of the leading scholarship on gambling in many fields, including psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, and history, of course.

One of the things that Leach mentioned was that all societies have sought to regulate gambling. That is simply not true. Anthropologists have found many examples of societies that have readily embraced gambling. Clifford Geertz, probably the most famous and noted anthropologists ever, has documented this in his path-breaking “Balinese Cockfight” article (path-breaking for anthropology more generally, not necessarily for gambling studies).

But ultimately some societies embrace gambling while others do not because gambling is finally a cultural construction—every culture and society understands gambling differently. Even the very definition of gambling is murky and contested. Gambling is generally defined, fairly universally across time and space, as taking some kind of risk or chance for a possible material gain. That seems simple enough, but what does that really mean? Many people refer to the stock market as gambling. Buying stocks is after all risking money for gain. Is investing in stocks gambling? Should we outlaw internet stock trading? By the way, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, people who bought and sold stocks were indeed considered “adventurers,” and there were numerous attempts to outlaw trading in stocks. Likewise, the morality of insurance companies was debated. After all, an insurance company is trading in the risk market, right? For every dollar that someone gives to an insurance company, they loose equity—that lost equity is the profit for insurance companies. But ultimately insurance companies risk going broke if they face an overwhelming amount of claims. Early modern Europe was still getting used to complex financial markets, so they often defined anything relating to financial markets as gambling. But as Europe’s economy developed, people began to accept “gambling” in finance. Today we obviously consider insurance and stock markets as integral parts of our free market system, not as gambling. In fact, most people would probably consider early modern Europe’s defining of financial markets as gambling as “backward.”

My point is simply that gambling is ultimately cultural. There’s no intrinsic definition, expectation, or understanding of it. How you see gambling is determined by your moral and cultural view. I point this out because people like Rep. Leach would have people think that gambling is a universally accepted evil when in fact it is far from it and far more problematic and complicated than that. Many of the arguments that Leach makes are the same ones people have made for centuries (it destroys families, causes crime, etc.). Though people have been making these claims that gambling is destroying the fabric of our society, I do not know of any society that has had major social problems because of gambling. I guess my concluding point would be that there is no right or wrong. If the Congress should pass the bill, it is simply choosing to force its cultural and moral values upon the country—not eradicating an intrinsic moral or social evil. After all, numerous other societies around the world, indeed most others, allow online gaming, including Great Britain (our closest ally in almost every way). I don’t think too many people would consider Britain to be backward, but many Britons are completely dumbfounded by this American debate on online gaming.