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......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 1602
Approximate Pages: 7 (260 words per double-spaced page) |