A year later, and nothing much has changed at all. Tim Cahill is pimping slots, the Commonwealth is broke, and Clyde Barrow is getting tons of free press for saying that, even though nobody has a job anymore, Bay Staters still loooooove to gamble in Connecticut, since their own government is run by a cruel gang of fasco-Puritans, etc.
This seems as good a time as any to resurrect a couple pieces of reporting I’d filed a while ago – which, if anybody had read them the first time around, might’ve headed off all this nonsense, so that we could more fully devote ourselves to more pressing matters, such as the medical status of Dustin Pedroia’s “shredded” physique.
First up, on Dr. Barrow, he of the “spending by Massachusetts residents is still sustaining the region’s gambling industry, especially in Connecticut and Rhode Island” fame. Here’s a couple things to keep in mind when you read Barrow’s economic projections, courtesy of this story I co-wrote with Julia Reischel.
Governor Deval Patrick’s own staff, even as it aped Barrow’s gambling legalization blueprint as its own, acknowledged that critics have assailed “the rigor of [Barrow's] economic analysis and the independence of the organization given its pro-gaming recommendations.” That’s because his research consists of counting license plates in the Foxwoods parking lot, and then making several logical leaps, one more fantastical than the next, to pull these numbers out of a puffy cloud somewhere. Aside from Barrow, numbers for the benefits of casino legalization don’t exist.
Here are some numbers that do exist: 2004, the year a St. Louis Fed found that casino gambling had gutted local retail trade by 25 percent while generating little, if any, relief on state budget crises; and 2006, the year the Boston Fed found that tourists who visit casinos don’t go shopping outside of casinos, and that urban casinos have “little secondary economic impact” on their host neighborhoods.
And slots? Here’s the background behind why they’re so wildly popular down near Philly: It’s because slot parlors are engineered to maximize addiction. About a year and a half ago, I was at a State House hearing about expanded gambling. An MIT researcher, Dr. Natasha Schull, testified that, in the span of a decade or two, slots have gone from loss-leaders to revenue-drivers.
That’s because, since slots now run on engineered software, and not mechanical probability, they’re now programmed to heighten the addictive response. In the industry’s terms, this generation of slot machines have been programmed to get gamblers to “play to extinction.” Schull likened it, alternately, to playing with loaded dice and smoking crack.