How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty
Gambling, it seems, is everywhere. From well-produced TV commercials for the state lottery to endless advertisements for 'daily fantasy sports' leagues, the invitation to play games with money is never ceasing.
- How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty Affect
- How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty Affects
- How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty In America
- How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty Increase
For many people gambling is not a harmful activity, but for some it can be a serious problem. A recent Reed in Partnership report found that 10% of working adults have direct experience of the problems gambling can cause in the workplace and more than four in five British adults think that gambling and debt can be a distraction for people in work. Gambling is a form of economic predation. Gambling grinds the faces of the poor into the ground. It benefits multinational corporations while oppressing the lower classes with illusory promises of wealth, and with (typically) low-wage, transitory jobs that simultaneously destroy every other economic engine of a local community. Gambling does not lead to poverty. Gambling Addiction like all addictions will destroy your life and have severe consequences on your financial status. But if you gamble within reason, like the vast majority of people do, it can be exciting and entertaining. Various studies have taken place within the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, which report a relationship between both problem gambling and poverty. Obviously, the former can lead to the latter in several instances. However, why does it seem that more deprived people and communities participate in gambling to a greater degree than.
I lived through it in my ancestral home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, as the casino industry promised an economic turnaround if voters would just give them the right to exist. Almost every state is involved in some discussion of state-sponsored gambling.
Pro-gambling elected officials aren't evil villains (necessarily). Yes, some of them are personally corrupt and poised to profit from the industry they are enabling. But many of these elected officials have good aims. They want to educate children, build infrastructure, and so on without raising a tax burden. I think gambling is an illusory way to do this, but, still, I acknowledge good intentions at the root of some of the cheerleaders for the industry.
But, unfortunately, I think both proponents and opponents of expanded gambling see this as merely a 'values' issue. Of course, conservative Christians don't support gambling because they see it as immoral, so they want it illegal. Often proponents of expanded gambling will reply that these Christians would, if they could, take the country back to Prohibition, because, after all, isn't drunkenness a sin too?
But gambling isn't merely a 'values' issue. Neither is it primarily a 'moral' issue, at least not in terms of what we typically classify as 'moral values' issues. Gambling isn't primarily a question of personal vice. If it were, we could simply ask our people to avoid the lottery tickets and horse-tracks, but leave it legal. Gambling is a justice issue that defines how it is that we love our neighbors and uphold the common good.
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Gambling is a form of economic predation. Gambling grinds the faces of the poor into the ground. It benefits multinational corporations while oppressing the lower classes with illusory promises of wealth, and with (typically) low-wage, transitory jobs that simultaneously destroy every other economic engine of a local community.
In the end, the casinos will leave. And they'll leave behind a burned-over district with no thriving agricultural, manufacturing, or tourism economies. In the meantime, they leave behind the wreckage of 'check-to-cash' loan sharks, pawn shops, prostitution, and 1-2-3 divorce courts.
Conservative Christians can't talk about gambling if we don't see the bigger picture.
First of all, most of the 'market' for gambling comes from those in despair, seeking meaning and a future. The most important thing a church can do to undercut the local casino is to preach the gospel. By that I don't just mean how to get saved (although that's certainly at the root of it). I mean the awe-filled wonder in the face of the really good news that Jesus is crucified and resurrected, the old dragon is overthrown.
Second, we must understand that gambling is an issue of economic justice. We can't really address the gambling issue if we ignore the larger issue of poverty. Evangelicals who don't care (as does Jesus, the prophets, and the apostles) about the poor can't speak adequately to the gambling issues. By this I don't simply mean caring about individual poor people but about the way social and political and corporate structures contribute to the misery of the impoverished (James 5:1-6). We will never get to the nub of the gambling issue if we don't get at a larger vision of poverty and the limits of commercial power.
This means asking the state not to use acquisitiveness and covetousness to separate people from their means of living. But it also means modeling a different kind of ethic in our churches. The power of gambling lies in a vision of the 'good life,' and that's a vision that is co-opted by the gambling industry, not created by them. It is fueled by our fallen vision of limitless growth, of limitless acquisition.
Let's oppose state-empowered gambling, but let's do so while loving the poor the industry seeks to devour. Let's work toward rebuilding families, honoring honest labor, and encouraging the flourishing of communities in which the impoverished are not invisible.
Too many of our 'opponents' see us as morally-prissy Victorians who don't want people doing 'naughty' things in our presence. Let's demolish that pretense, by being the gritty colony of the kingdom that sees the economically downtrodden among us as, when in Christ, 'heirs of the kingdom' (Jas. 2:5). And let's hold out a vision, for all of us, of an inheritance that comes not through predation, and not through luck, but through sonship, through grace.
This article was originally posted here
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It is common knowledge that poverty and substance abuse tend to exist in tandem. The direction of causation is unclear, but the link between addiction and poverty is certainly to be considered.
A study by the National Bureau for Economic Research studied the relationship between poverty and drug abuse, specifically marijuana and cocaine. The study found that there was a positive relationship between poverty and substance abuse, even when controlling for various familial factors—implying that substance abuse may even be a casual factor of poverty. A limitation of the study was that it could not account for the drug usage of the homeless and others, which further strengthened the case that drug usage may be a causal factor of poverty.
And yet, it still isn’t that simple. The study had other limitations. The drug usage was self-reported, the population studied was highly biased (mostly poor already), and assumptions on preferences and educational effects (among others) could not be proved. Nonetheless, it seems that there is a definitive relationship between drugs and poverty, and perhaps even some causal effect.
Poverty and Addition: Directly or Inversely Related?
But could the causal effect also run the other way? Quite possibly. A study from Duke University found that economically stressed children later in life experienced higher rates of tobacco usage (but not binge drinking or marijuana). The researchers attributed this effect to poverty’s impact on self-control. Although the study did not find increases in marijuana usage or other drugs, the causal chain between poverty and eventual drug usage was established.
How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty Affect
Although evidence seems to suggest that, to some degree, drug usage can “cause” poverty, extending this logic to an extreme would be absurd. Substance abuse is not the sole driving force behind the worldwide phenomena of poverty; people born into poverty cannot have been driven to poverty by drug usage. There must be more to explain the relationship that clearly exists.
How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty Affects
Another research paper suggests that literacy, education, poverty, income equality and unemployment are factors that lead to drug abuse, further complicating the relationship.
Conflicting papers do lead to an obvious but important point. Poverty and addiction are interlinked. Conjoined at the hip, both issues feed off each other and their effects strengthen their respective feedback loops. Poverty leads to mental states which can lead to drug abuse which leads to addiction, which begets crime, which leads to worse employment prospects. A flow diagram to show the effects and directions that these two conditions could lead to would be a huge circular mess, with arrows flying in all directions.
The question then becomes, how does a government fight poverty or substance abuse? Based on existing evidence, perhaps the best answer is that one problem cannot be adequately addressed without also attending to the other.
How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty In America
– Martin Yim
How Does Gambling Lead To Poverty Increase
Sources: NBER, Duke Medicine, International Journal of Basic & Applied Sciences
Photo: The Province
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