Gambling, Society and the Evolution of Risk-Taking

Gambling is emerging as a major industry around the world at a time when many of the more traditional economic pursuits are becoming less productive, but while the burgeoning gambling industry is certainly profitable and provides good investment opportunities and economic benefits for business and communities alike, it is timely that we look more closely at the overall benefits and costs of this phenomenon in modern society. In this book about the modern gambling business, a motif of the Colorado River and the Boulder/Hoover Dam is explored in the opening section, likening the benefits and risks of gambling to those of the damning of the Colorado to irrigate California. There can be no doubt that the project wrested many Americans from poverty and unemployment in the depression, built a world-leading engineering structure that served to help the desert bloom, so to speak, including, of course, the re-making of Las Vegas. With the wisdom of hindsight and our increasing environmental awareness, the choking of the Colorado has had its downsides as does the gambling industry as we already know.