Is Gambling an Acceptable Form of Leisure - Essay Example

MAJOR ESSAY By Name Course Instructor Institution City/State Date Is Gambling an Acceptable Form of Leisure? Introduction Currently, the gambling industry has already turned out to be a big international industry. Thanks to the rapid technological development, placing a bet in another country through internet devoid of travelling has become possible; thus, gambling has become easier. For this reason, gambling is rooted in the society as an essential type of entertainment and leisure and is as well utilized as a revenue source for both the government agencies and private sectors. Considering that we are living in a post-modern society, Davies and Abram (2001, p.4) posit that gambling has turned out to be more and more viewed as an acceptable pursuit for leisure. In a number of instances, gambling is considered as edge work with attributes of deliberate risk taking. Nowadays gambling is legalized and marketed as leisure with safe risk, thus, indicating that gambling risks are manageable. As pointed out by Best (2010, p.34), good leisure must be socially acceptable, and should not have negative effects. However, in actual fact, there exists numerous types of deviant leisure, such as gambling, which undoubtedly has been utilized by people like a form of leisure. And so, gambling cannot be considered as a good leisure but an acceptable form of leisure where it is legalized. Still, there exists no clear evidence exhibiting that gambling as a leisure activity has improved people’s life quality. Therefore, the question of whether gambling is an acceptable form of leisure has been debated extensively. So, this essay seeks to substantiate that gambling is an acceptable form of leisure. Discussion Gambling has been defined by the Church of England (2006, p.4) as an activity that involves any behavior related to wagering or betting one’s money or property, whereby the outcome relies on chance and is uncertain. So, gambling is a game of chance, where all transactions are anchored on a person gain and a loss of another person. On the other hand, leisure has been defined by Hummel (2009, p.120) as freedom from day to day responsibilities as well as tasks. Leisure and gambling are interrelated since both activities are associated with recreation. In its totality, gambling entails activities that arouse emotion of the people. Even though others feel sadness after losing a gamble, those with the gambling mastery consider gambling as an entertaining activity offering them the leisure. Though gambling is practiced in entertainment areas such as casinos, its morality as well as legality remains debatable. Historically, gambling was linked with organised crime, but has developed over years to become more socially acceptable. This was attributed to the government’s changed attitudes in numerous countries after realising that gambling results in increased economic revenues. Since then gambling has been perceived as an acceptable and a legitimate form of leisure as well as social entertainment. In Australia, gambling is a growing and popular leisure activity with Australians gambling a total of $13,839 million between 2000 and 2001 (Crofts, 2003, p.2). According to the Church of England (2006, p.4), gambling taxation offers a growing and considerable percentage of income collected by territory and state governments. In Europe, the United Kingdom is the leading gambling country, making up almost 22 per cent of the total gambling market in Europe. Based on the total gambling yield, the United States is the leading nation in the world with US$88bn in 2004 in comparison to Europe’s US$67bn (The Church of England, 2006, p.4). Basically, understating leisure is imperative so as to comprehend the societal place of gambling. Still, leisure has been misconstrued by people as a disposable time subsequent to personal obligations such as work. Other people, on the other hand, consider leisure as a time for eating out, watching television, involving in sporting activities and other forms of interesting activities. In the past, gambling connoted playing deceitfully or playing false, and so was described as an act of chasing for monetary benefit devoid of utilizing skills. Gamblers have progressively improved and acquired gambling skills; thus, managing to master the techniques that may boost their probabilities of winning particular games. As observed by Binde (2013, p.81), people involve themselves in gambling activities not just for recreational purposes, but also for reasons such as psychological, financial, cultural, and sociological purposes. Moreover, some people gamble so as to escape from their day-to-day activities and for excitement reasons. The Church of England (2006) posits that casinos are perceived by people as high society places and places for people who love entertainment and leisure. Besides that, a number of persons like gambling for the reason that it is a fragment of the modern social system. For instance, gambling has been introduced even to children such as playing cards, and so they may grow up perceiving gambling is an acceptable part of social life that should not be avoided. According to Shaffer (2003, p.210), casinos where gambling happens offers the most the best form of entertainment needed, and they provide almost the same or more excitement as compared to movie theatres as well as amusement parks. So, gambling according to Zangeneh et al. (2007, p.123) is meant for entertaining people, and its legitimisation by numerous countries makes it an acceptable form of leisure. Scores of persons consider gambling as a type of leisure because it is normally performed in a social context offering entertainment as well as secure venues for enjoying free time. As mentioned by Zangeneh et al. (2007, p.123), scores of people in this social context delight in the excitement as well as thrill provided by the casino where gambling takes place. Gambling is considered an acceptable form of leisure because it is socially beneficial such that money can be raised through various forms of gambling such as lotteries for a local community or social initiative. The Gambling industry generates almost £63 billion, which evidently is an attractive means for the government to make revenue through taxation. Therefore, opening the gambling industry up will certainly boost revenues collected from this source, that is already rewarding. Still, Abbott et al. (2004, p.26) are worried that the government’s desire for more tax revenues is resulting to changes without consideration of the public’s social wellbeing. Particularly, Abbott et al. (2004, p.31) is concerned about problems associated with gambling like family life breakdown, indebtedness as well as addiction. In essence, gambling involves numerous activities such as football betting, gambling in casinos, playing the lottery as well as online gambling. For most gamblers, gambling activities are an entertaining form of leisure, useful for relaxing, socialising, for excitement, and for winning money. For gamblers, losses attributed to gambling are the cost of entertainment similar to the money paid for football or tickets or cinema, so losses in gambling is a price paid for having a good time. Gambling is viewed by social scientists in two different ways; some view it as an uneconomical, unproductive, and even absurd activity. In this school of thought, it is argued that gamblers believe on a long-run win, so they continue gambling even if they lose. So, they see their patronage in the casino as a means of increasing their incomes. Certainly, this perception is completely erroneous with most of games in the casino having a negative expected value, which often surpass the 5 per cent of all dollars gambled. Basically, some forms of gambling like perfect play or card-counting can offer the gambler some advantage, but according to Zimmerman (2011, p.50) the player’s statistical advantage in such games is exceedingly small to make any impact on the gambler financial status. Moreover, systems like card-counting need patience and skill to be beneficial, and as noted by to Zimmerman (2011, p.50) most of the casino patrons lack such attributes. Gambling as a recreational activity cannot rationally result into a win; therefore, gamblers according to Zimmerman (2011, p.51) are just deceiving themselves by taking part in the activity that is intrinsically irrational. Zimmerman (2011, p.51) posits that gambling is uneconomical considering that scarce resources are devoted by companies to an activity, wherein wealth is transferred only from people involving in gambling to casinos with no value being generated. In another school of thought, gambling is viewed as a consumption good, wherein casino patrons know gambling for a long time will leave them with less money than they had before gambling. As a leisure activity, gambling is not considered as a way to win money by some patrons, especially the rich people, even though they always anticipate winning eventually. Instead, they engage in gambling activities to enjoy and spend their free time. So, gambling as a recreational activity is an acceptable form of leisure as evidenced by large interests of people in various countries, and little or no effort from governments to impede the spread of casinos within their country. As suggested by the economic theory, when gamblers anticipate to (faultily) increasing their revenues by taking part in gambling, then only people with lower incomes gambling should take part in gambling. According to Zimmerman (2011, p.51), the logic presented in this hypothesis is also underlined in the framework of backward-bending labour supply curve, which points out that low-income employees’ marginal utility related to income is moderately high in comparison to that for leisure. Therefore, a chance to improve their income by increasing their wage rate encourages low-income employees to spend almost all their time including that for leisure to generate income. On the other hand, high-income employees behave differently because they spend most of their free time for leisure activities, and not for income generating activities. Due to the declining marginal income utility, Zimmerman (2011, p.51) posits that high-income employees care less about extra earnings; rather they value extra time for leisure activities. Therefore, an increased wage rate enables high-income employees to delight in more leisure whereas retaining the same income through reducing their working hours. So, higher wages result in more work amongst low-income employees as well as less work amongst high-income employees. This argument indicates that higher incomes must be related to less gambling, that is if gambling is work for generating income. For people with low incomes, they avoid leisure so as to take part in activities that generate income, which according to Zimmerman (2011, p.51) includes gambling. Similarly, gambling patrons with high incomes prefer spending their leisure time doing relaxing things, and not to increase their incomes, leading to more involvement in gambling because the perceive casino as a leisure activity. Considering that high-income patrons are inclined to spend more of the free time in leisure activities, they are inclined to spend more time to gamble as compared to those lower income patrons, who spend more of the free time working for extra income. So, there is a positive correlation between gambling, especially in casino and income. Even though, leisure should bring contentment to people within the society, gambling as a form of leisure can result in misunderstandings amongst individuals. Besides that, gambling has led to arguments, monetary pressure, dishonest between partakers and their co-workers, family, and friends. Regrettably, gambling in some instance, as observed by Suomi et al. (2013), leads to domestic violence and family break-ups; for instance, in Australia, more than 1600 divorces occur every year because of gambling. Moreover, gambling as a form of leisure activity can lead to social problems like alcoholism, drug abuse and psychological-related health problems. Gambling has negative effect on gamblers from poor communities; for instance, a vicar in Birmingham calculated that thousands of pounds are spent weekly on gambling, especially National Lottery, and the amount of returns gained through Lotteries Community Fund is insignificant. In poor communities, the Church of England (2006, p.23) posits that gambling has created a culture of corporate acquiescence as well as despair resulting in a huge gap between the rich and poor, and so the leisure in it is over showed by the losses experienced by the poor people who gamble to improve the financial status. Instead of invest collectively so as improve their communities’ financial ability, gambling has made scores of people to pursue financial glory individually. However, only a few succeeds, leaving most of them worse they were before gambling and a number of families broken by the after-effects of incontrollable gambling. Therefore, even if gambling is considered a form of leisure, it only serves the interest of high-income earners who have a lot of leisure time and also benefits governments through taxation revenue. But not for the poor people, who gamble to improve their income and not as leisure activity and the after effects cannot be ignored. In Australia, for instance, 20% of the gambler according to Productivity Committee of Australia suffered alcoholism while other have health-related problems like stomach problems, anxiety, headaches, insomnia, and depressive moods. Conclusion In conclusion, both the supporters and critics of gambling have to acknowledge the fact that gambling is an acceptable form of leisure in the modern society. It assists the government and the entertainment providers to curb various forms of social evils such as organised crime related to gambling. As mentioned in the essay, leisure is more exposed to increased capitalization, such that people gamble to increase their income and not just for leisure. So, leisure has lost its elements of choice and freedom and developed into an income generating work. As indicated in the essay, legalization of gambling in various countries has increased the availability of gambling activities to all social groups, and is expected to grow further in the future. Gambling has resulted in addiction and associated problems such as violence, stress, alcohol abuse, and so forth. To sum up, gambling is evidently an acceptable form of leisure due to its related forms of recreation, and it enables gamblers to enjoy with their money and have a good time. References Abbott, P.M., Volberg, D.R., Bellringer, D.M. & Reith, D.G., 2004. A Review Of Research On Aspects Of Problem Gambling. Confidential Report. London: Responsibility in Gambling Trust. Best, S., 2010. Socio-economic and cultural approaches to leisure. In Socio-economic and cultural approaches to leisure. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. pp.31-55. Binde, P., 2013. Why people gamble: A model with five motivational dimensions. International Gambling Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, pp.81-97. Crofts, P., 2003. Researching The Link Between Gambling And Crime. In Evaluation in Crime and Justice: Trends and Methods Conference. Canberra, 2003. Australian Institute of Criminology. Davies, R.O. & Abram, R.G., 2001. Betting the Line: Sports Wagering in American Life. Ohio : Ohio State University Press. Hummel, C.E., 2009. Freedom from Tyranny of the Urgent. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press. Shaffer, H., 2003. Futures at Stake: Youth, Gambling, and Society. Nevada City, California: University of Nevada Press. Suomi, A. et al., 2013. Problem gambling and family violence: family member reports of prevalence, family impacts and family coping. Asian Journal of Gambling Issues and Public Health, vol. 3, pp.1-15. The Church of England, 2006. Gambling or Gaming: Entertainment or Exploitation? [Online] Available at: https://www.churchofengland.org/media/36534/gambling.pdf [Accessed 13 June 2015]. Zangeneh, M., Blaszczynski, A. & Turner, N.E., 2007. In the Pursuit of Winning: Problem Gambling Theory, Research and Treatment. New York: Springer Science & Business. Zimmerman, J., 2011. Casino Gambling As An Income-Based Leisure Activity: Evidence From The Gambling Impact And Behavior Study. Journal of Business & Economics Research, vol. 1, no. 12, pp.49-58. Read More