Wagers of Sin

The not-so-secret agenda of America's anti-gambling guru

Robert Detlefsen from the December 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

The Luck Business is best understood as a continuation of themes developed in After the Planners (1971) and The Last Entrepreneurs (1979). Goodman himself draws the thread, telling REASON: "The reason I got interested in gambling was that I was looking at what cities and states were doing to improve their economies. Quite a number of them had either gone into or were considering gambling as
a form of economic development." Read in sequence, the three works suggest that Goodman's analysis of the economic effects of gambling is driven by his overarching commitment to a vision of planning and regulation that he calls "community socialism."

That term is missing from The Luck Business, and also from Goodman's congressional testimony and numerous media interviews on the subject of legalized gambling. But it recurs throughout the two earlier volumes. Indeed, there is much in Goodman's pre-gambling oeuvre that foreshadows the methods and biases that would eventually inform his writing on gambling. In After the Planners, he abandons any pretense to objective scholarship, declaring at the outset that "it is no longer possible for us to masquerade as `disinterested,' `objective' professionals." (The book is dedicated to "all those brave people who won't put up with it.")

Goodman's goals are succinctly stated in dozens of passages such as this: "Our problem is not simply to destroy capitalism, but to do this through the creation of a culture which will not tolerate the repressive and competitive values which capitalism has already induced us to accept." And this: "[W]e must aim at creating a cultural existence, a way of life, which requires just outputs. For example, if a community decides that a better architectural environment or a better educational program is to be produced, its way of measuring the usefulness of these programs would not result from calculating how much more money will be made through `keeping the workers happy' or by giving them more skills, but rather from evaluating the effects of a better architectural environment and better forms of education on the quality of people's lives."

Attention to "the quality of people's lives" is one of Goodman's central preoccupations. But "quality of life," like "social justice," is a notoriously slippery standard that usually means whatever the person invoking it wants it to mean. In Goodman's case, it clearly has nothing to do with the preferences of actual people as expressed in the marketplace. For example, if you derive pleasure from, say, drinking single-malt scotch or playing games of chance, you might think that having access to these things would enhance the quality of your life. But Goodman has long denied that individual persons are in a position to know best what is good for them.

Thus, when it comes to something like architecture, Goodman suggests in After the Planners that decisions about economic and even personal living arrangements are best left to collective political processes. He exhorts planning professionals to use their technical knowledge, and the authority it conveys, to transform societal values. "Design opportunities," he writes, "can be used as a way of explaining the advantage of community-ownership and management of all income-producing ventures--the factories, the housing, and the shopping places." Architects can further acquaint people with the satisfactions of community socialism by designing "communal buildings, where people share facilities and spaces, [which] would present an alternative to the present single-family house or apartment unit." Although he champions neighborhoods against technocracy, Goodman conjures a familiar tableau, that of the masses being disabused of their vulgar tastes and prejudices by a political cadre.

In The Last Entrepreneurs, Goodman deplores when businesses search for greater profits by moving plants and jobs from states with high taxes and militant unions to low-tax, non-unionized states. Rather than acquiesce in a pernicious game of "regional rotation" among private firms, he urges policy makers to recognize that economic instability provides a rationale for increasingly aggressive state interventions. The possibility of widespread business failure should be seized upon as "the opening wedge to develop public, locally owned enterprises," including factories, energy companies, and banks.

Any potential resistance to such proposals could be countered, Goodman suggests, by using the example of existing state-run enterprises to win acceptance for the creation of more advanced forms of socialism. It is in The Last Entrepreneurs that Goodman reveals his nascent interest in legalized gambling, endorsing "the idea of linking state lotteries and gambling to the creation of other state-organized operations. While public gambling can hardly be considered a traditional path to socialism, it might be useful to consider it as a step....The problem is not getting more states to run gambling operations but how to refocus existing gambling enterprise to create more progressive forms of socialism. A regional socialist movement could use the precedent of government gambling operations to demonstrate that public ownership is no longer a radical departure."

These passages make clear why, in The Luck Business, Goodman reserves his harshest criticism for private, commercial forms of gambling--especially casinos. State-run lotteries are of interest only insofar as their worst features and practices can be used to smear commercial gambling enterprises. Indeed, one of the book's most striking characteristics is its refusal to acknowledge important distinctions among the various forms of legal gambling. Legal gambling enterprises in the United States have become extraordinarily diverse, encompassing pari-mutuel betting at horse and dog racing tracks, charity bingo, state lotteries, and commercial and Indian casino gaming. A recent addition to this mix is "convenience gambling"--the placement of slot machines and video poker terminals in restaurants, drug stores, and gas stations. Given such variety, it hardly makes sense to view gambling as monolithic.

The Luck Business, however, repeatedly makes invidious generalizations about "gambling" and "the gambling industry" on the basis of evidence drawn mainly from the experience of state lotteries. Thus Goodman criticizes public officials for spending huge sums to advertise and promote "gambling," without acknowledging that broadcast advertisements for casino gambling are generally restricted--and in no way sponsored--by government. And rather than draw attention to the fact that lotteries alone are creatures of the state, Goodman tries to portray "the gambling industry" as universally benefiting from "government subsidies." As happens throughout the book, a sweeping indictment is supported by anecdotal evidence from one small corner of the industry. Here, "government subsidies" turn out to be tax reductions for horse-racing tracks in half a dozen states.

All of this goes a long way toward explaining why Goodman, in his critique of legalized gambling, gives short shrift to the simple theory that people gamble because they regard gambling as a pleasurable form of entertainment. To Goodman, legalized gambling, like capitalism in general, is a system designed to enable business owners to oppress workers and exploit consumers. The fact that Americans paid 154 million visits to casinos in 1995 merely confirms the extent of their victimization. To see what people really want, we must look not to the votes they cast with their pocketbooks but to their involvement in mass political movements. Thus, insists Goodman in The Luck Business, it is "crucial to understand that gambling is spreading in America not because of a popular movement clamoring for more opportunities to gamble, but because of aggressive lobbying by the gambling industry and the promotional efforts of politicians."

Such an analysis leaves unanswered the question of why people gamble. Lobbying by casino developers can only have the effect of lifting government prohibitions against gambling. It cannot force people to the blackjack tables and slot machines. Casino companies, and the politicians who appreciate the tax revenues to be reaped from legal gambling, understand that a great many people like to gamble and that, if given the opportunity, they will.

Why people gamble has long fascinated social scientists, and there is a wealth of research on the matter, including a famous study by eminent sociologist Erving Goffman. In the 1960s, Goffman worked as a blackjack dealer and croupier in Las Vegas and concluded that gambling was a surrogate for the risk taking that has been removed from daily life courtesy of the modern, bureaucratic state. Similarly, other researchers, such as psychologist Igor Kusyszyn and sociologist Felicia Campbell, have concluded that gambling provides positive stimulation for participants.

In The Luck Business, Goodman ignores such work, presumably because it contradicts his view that bettors are suckers who approach gambling as an investment opportunity, rather than as a form of entertainment. That false premise becomes the launching pad for a wide-ranging critique of "the new culture of chance" and "the new speculators." The latter are middle-class investors who, during the 1980s and early '90s, joined the wealthy in pursuing "new strategies for speculating in real estate, the stock market, and collectibles." It troubles Goodman that during this period, "income for people with investments grew three times faster than for those who were working for their money." In the grand tradition of socialist populism, Goodman celebrates honest labor while denigrating idle speculation, and he warns that this "broad shift in the American economy toward popular speculation is directing increasing amounts of human and financial resources into unproductive activities." By Goodman's reckoning, the new speculators include casino gamblers, owners of mutual funds, and even children who "by the age of ten,...
already know about speculating in old baseball cards, comic books, or Barbie dolls." To the list of dangers that the modern world poses to the spiritual health and well-being of our kids, Goodman adds the corrosive allure of "an old Mickey Mantle card or first-edition Superman comic book."

Of course, Goodman is not content to depict gambling as just another socially useless investment strategy. Gambling is worse than the others because it takes a huge toll in "social costs." We learn, for example, that "the American Insurance Institute estimated that 40 percent of all white-collar crime had its roots in gambling"--an item subsequently repeated in The Economist. Trouble is, there is no such organization as the "American Insurance Institute." Goodman's citation on the matter uncritically passes on a claim made in an obscure publication. As for the 40 percent figure, it cannot be taken seriously: U.C.-Irvine criminologist Paul Jesilow notes that to arrive at this datum, one would have to identify all white-collar crime--a nebulous category that includes everything from a worker stealing a pencil from his employer to insider stock trading and antitrust violations--and ask all the perpetrators why they did what they did.

Goodman's tendentious use of statistics is nowhere more evident than in The Luck Business's discussion of "problem gamblers," a group he says comprises "between 1.5 to 6.5 percent of the adult population." The notion that so-called problem gambling is sweeping the country as legal gambling becomes more accessible is perhaps the most potent weapon of those who deplore gambling's "social costs," which, says Goodman, include suicide, divorce, job loss, and the aforementioned "white-collar crime." But Goodman doesn't define "problem gambling" in The Luck Business.