Program Item Details
TITLE: Dr. Rob Williams, Professor, School of Health Sciences, University of Lethbridge and Researcher, Alberta Gaming Research Institute
SUBJECT: #201 AGRI Conference on the Economic and Social Impacts of Gambling
SYNOPSIS: The growth of gambling as a global industry has people everywhere arguing over whether the benefits outweigh the social and economic costs to communities. Determining the answers to those questions is fertile ground for gambling researchers. Recently a number of international experts met in Banff at a conference hosted by The Alberta Gaming
Research Institute to share their experiences.
AUDIO: Download Audio (mp3 format)
TRANSCRIPT:
#201 May 23, 2006
Interview starts at 1:04
Intro: It was only few years ago that if you wanted to visit a casino or play the slot machines, you’d have to take a trip to Las Vegas or Monte Carlo. Today, those gaming opportunities are as close as the local bar or shopping mall. The rise of legal gambling is a phenomenon that is taking the world by storm. And as governments become more and more dependent on gambling revenues to finance their budgets, people are wondering if this is truly in the public good.
In the scientific community, Alberta is emerging as a leader in gambling research. Earlier this spring, the Alberta Gaming Research Institute hosted a conference in Banff to look at more effective ways to analyze the costs and benefits of gambling. The conference was organized by Dr. Rob Williams, a professor with the School of Health Sciences at the University of Lethbridge and a principal investigator with the Alberta Gaming Research Institute.
Dr. Rob Williams
RW: We’re really trying to make some progress on this really thorny issue of whether the social costs and benefits, how do they compare to the economic costs and benefits and overall is gambling good or bad thing for society. It’s an incredibly important issue and we don’t have some good answers to that yet. And this conference is really an attempt to sharpen our focus and improve our methodologies and try to come to some resolution about whether the benefits really outweigh the costs and vice versa.
CC: WHY IS METHODOLOGY SUCH AN IMPORTANT ISSUE?
RW: It’s all hinged on methodology. That this is as I said in my presentation, this is the methodology complex issue in gambling research, because there are so many variables that are involved in economic impacts, let alone the social impacts. And then the biggest problem is the combining of those things. I mean, how do you equate five new jobs created in the industry versus five new bankruptcies created by problem gamblers. Are they equivalent and how do you balance one versus the other. So it’s these very thorny methodological issues that has made it very difficult to come to any consensus about whether the pros outweigh the cons.
CC: HAVE YOU MADE ANY PROGRESS AT THIS POINT TO BE ABLE TO SAY DO IT THIS WAY VERSUS THAT WAY?
RW: There have been a couple of people advocating different solutions to that. I’ve advocated one solution, which is I don’t think there ever will be consensus. Rather that there is no common metric that you can use for a suicides plus job creation or tax revenues versus bankruptcies. It’s rather that the only way you can do it is to combine all your clear monetary costs into one common monetary metric and then have different indices for bankruptcy percentage increase, suicides percentage increase. And then you have 15 different indices which are your ultimate measure of the costs and benefits. And then it’s an inherently subjective judgment how you weigh those. So that’s my approach.
One of the other presenters today, Mark Anielski, argues for a genuine progress indicator, which is trying to create a common metric of wellbeing of society. Now there are methodological complexities there. So we’re basically positing different approaches and seeing what sort of attention and support we garner from these proposals.
CC: PEOPLE AT THIS CONFERENCE ARE FROM KOREA, AUSTRALIA, THE UNITED KINGDOM, THE UNITED STATES AND, OF COURSE, ACROSS CANADA. IS THERE ONE PICTURE THAT IS EMERGING?
RW: No. Because the reality is, the costs and benefits are very jurisdiction specific. I would love to be able to do a socio-economic costs and benefits analysis of gambling Nevada because it would take about a half hour to do. Clearly, the economic costs far outweigh the social costs or any economic costs as well, because you have a huge influx of money from tourists who leave their money there and to the extent that social problems are caused, well, they take their problems home with them.
And so Nevada is a jurisdiction where the solution is completely different from Alberta which is completely different from Korea. In Korea, they were talking about they only have one domestic casino. And so the local patronage can’t patronize their own casinos. So from a social perspective, that is much more likely to minimize the harm than say in Alberta where we have casinos that are almost exclusively patronized by locals. And so there is no solution. The solution is very jurisdiction specific.
The consensus concerns, we’re having a greater consensus this time about the appropriate approaches,to try to come to those decisions for each jurisdiction.
CC: ARE THERE ANY COMMON THEMES THOUGH GROWING OUT OF THIS?
RW: There are no common themes in terms of the results. The common themes tend to be in terms of recognizing that there are inherently more valid methodological approaches. The good thing about this area of research is that the studies are getting better and better in terms of their sophistication and quality. And that’s because of conferences like this where we realize, oh, I never though about measuring that impact or measuring that impact in that way, or that’s clearly a better way than it’s been done before.
So what is emerging is some common consensus on not all the methodological points, but many of the methodological approaches that you need to take to do a good job of this.
CC: HOW DO YOU TAKE THIS THEN AND TURN IT INTO PUBLIC POLICY? BECAUSE ULTIMATELY IT IS OUR CIVIC LEADERS OUR POLITICAL LEADERS WHERE THE RESULTS OF THE METHODOLOGY, WHERE THEY GO, WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO THEM?
RW: Well that is the purpose of all this. It’s a fascinating academic exercise. It’s wonderfully complex and as an academic, I really love the complexity of the area. But the reality is, it’s the most pertinent issue from the government’s perspective. The government makes the discreet decision that either it allows gambling or it doesn’t. And that’s largely on the basis of the answer to the question, do the costs outweigh the benefits or vice versa. So what we’re trying to do here is come up with a consensus on methodology so it can be applied to places like Alberta.
This province is in dire need of such an analysis and I think we’re coming to a greater consensus about what that approach should be. And now there should be some money potentially available to do such an analysis here.
What has been profiled today are results that have occurred in other jurisdictions like Korea, the United States, Australia this afternoon, that have shaped government policy. Although I’m a bit cynical there as well because you see some of the results of the US National Gambling Impact Study or the Australian one, and government policy continues despite the results sometimes. But our ultimate hope as researchers is that we do good clear objective scientific research which would impact government policy around that. That’s our intent.
CC: I THINK THE THING THAT’S REALLY COME HOME TO ME IS THAT THE CONCERN OVER PROBLEM AND PATHOLOGICAL GAMBLING THOUGH IS A VERY COMMON ONE AND IT’S SOMETHING THAT EVERYBODY IS LOOKING AT.
RW: Yes, that’s true, but just to play the devil’s advocate, what the industry and what the government and what researchers also argue s that there has probably been too much focus on problem pathological gambling which only constitutes 3 or 4 percent of the population. That the large majority of the populace gambles, you know, buys lottery tickets or plays bingo or scratch and win and they do it without problems
And yet when your truly trying to come to some aggregate decision about the leisure benefits or the social and economic benefits, you need to take into the account the enjoyable and innocuous benefits that this form of entertainment has for the large majority of people. Now that has to be offset with the enormous social problems incurred by problem gamblers. But you can’t focus on one and not the other.
CC: THANK YOU VERY MUCH, ROB.
RW: You’re more than welcome.
Dr. Rob Williams is a Professor in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Lethbridge and a principal investigator with the Alberta Gaming Research Institute. He helped organize the recent conference in Banff on the social and economic impacts of gambling.
FEATURED LINK: Alberta Gaming Research Institute
FEATURED LINK: University of Lethbridge