Gambling Industry and Social Impacts

I wrote my chapter on gambling out of the Trump Taj Mahal

in Atlantic City before Donald Trump ever announced he was running for president.

And at that point, the Taj had fallen into deep decline.

Rodents all over the place, mold, mildew,

rooms were mothballed, attics were shooting up in the elevators,

a kind of window into the America Donald Trump is about to create.

Eighty percent of gamblers go to slot machines,

which are designed to anesthetize you, much like heroin or opioids.

And of course, they're completely tracked.

Many of the mechanisms of the security and surveillance state

are actually taking from the gambling industry, which creates very sophisticated profiles.

I mean, even to the point where they have projected

how much a habitual gambler will spend during his or her lifetime.

Emile Durkheim's study of suicide.

published in the late 19th century in France,

he went and tried to explore what is it that drove people to commit suicide.

And that's where he coins the term anomie,

that alienation, that disconnectedness that plunged people into a state

where they wanted to take their own life.

I wanted, in the book, to focus on that,

what Durkheim called that anomie, to make it clear,

if we didn't radically restructure our society, these pathologies would only grow.