My family never gambled, except for a few penny bets on card games with friends. So we were never in danger of being ruined by gambling debts. I inherited this risk-averse attitude, although I do occasionally buy a lottery ticket, as a gesture towards financial planning.
Gambling is a huge business, growing three or four times as fast as boring old manufacturing industries. New casinos are being proposed all over the place in Brooklyn, Coney Island, Times Square, and at Shinnecock in the Hamptons. The demand seems to be insatiable. Any gambling fever that cannot be satisfied in a big, glitzy building can be satisfied at home on the computer, or on your smart phone, so that gambling opportunities are unlimited, and addicts have a continuous, legal supply of their favorite drug.
Everything I know about casino gambling comes from old James Bond movies. I have admired the magnificent casino buildings at Monte Carlo and Baden-Baden from a safe distance but was never tempted to enter. These places seemed to me no more than a trap for upper-class playboys with unlimited amounts of money to throw away, and beautiful young blondes who were there to help them. But this image is sadly out of date. Gambling is fully democratic now, all the way from elegant casinos to backroom slot machines, whose users are all in their way participating in the same experience — the romance of risk.
Money is hard to earn for most of us, and it seems strange to dispose of it so carelessly without much chance of getting anything back. But everybody wants to be a winner, although casino profits suggest that the flow of money is almost entirely in the opposite direction.
Gambling never goes out of style. It seems to be written into the human DNA. It was popular in China two thousand years ago, and the ancient Romans were obsessed with it, betting with a throw of the dice on everything from chariot races to gladiators. The mighty Roman Emperor Augustus was an enthusiastic gambler, although he was not himself a casino operator. He lost a lot of money and finally decided that gambling was poisoning the Roman Empire because it drove so many people into poverty. When he tried to ban it, he failed completely. Even emperors can’t change human nature.
Gambling was illegal and even condemned as sinful in much of the United States until the 1970s. Las Vegas, Sin City, was about the only place you could waste so much money so quickly without literally burning it. Then the laws changed and the floodgates opened. Now gambling is not sin, it’s fun, it’s everywhere, and it’s a $250 billion industry, almost literally a license to print money. You can’t argue with that kind of success.
Gambling has spread through the culture until it virtually is the culture, as it was in ancient Rome. Wall Street is nothing but a gigantic gaming house and the business of government — always a game of chance at the best of times — seems more and more to be conducted on the lines of a casino. The advertising is shameless, the entertainment is loud and tacky, the odds are stacked against the punters, and one of the Presidential candidates is a former casino operator. Let’s hope we get lucky this time.
