I don’t believe in the prohibition of gambling or pretty much anything consenting adults want to do, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize casinos for what they are: predatory pits where the deck is stacked, an attraction that draws people in and spits them out, places without clocks that steal your time. From Edward Luce’s excellent Financial Times essay about the serious economic and political challenges currently facing America, a segment about the false hope of glitzy gambling parlors in former manufacturing centers:

“From Florida to California, and numerous Native American reservations in between, the impact of gambling varies, according to a welter of studies. Some show that the effect on the people around the casinos is a net negative. It can also be bad for tax revenues. One study estimated that for every dollar a gaming house invests in an area, three are subtracted by the costs of dealing with its social effects. Casinos may be a way of replacing some of the manufacturing jobs lost to China, Brazil and elsewhere. But they are also a magnet for racketeers, pimps, drugs and those living on the margins.

In a world where the economic centre of gravity is shifting from west to east, the continued faith in casinos, and other forms of gaming, epitomises a certain bankruptcy of thinking among America’s policy makers. On the charts they show up as service jobs, which economists instinctively treat as superior to jobs that involve making things. Much like the shift from farming to manufacturing a century ago, America is now climbing up the value-added chain to the more cerebral world of service industries. Brain power is America’s future.

It doesn’t always appear too cerebral in practice. Too large a share of the new service jobs are dead-end and enforced part-time positions that enable the employer to wriggle out of providing healthcare insurance. In the past decade, the number of Americans insured by their employers has fallen from two-thirds to barely half. Only the senior managerial slots offer any real security and they are mostly taken by outsiders. Much the same could be said of the armies of food preparers, domestic carers and data-entry workers who account for so many of the new service jobs America is creating.

‘We are on track to becoming a country where the top tier remains wealthy beyond imagination, and the remainder, in one way or another, are working in jobs that help make the lives of the elites more comfortable,’ says Harvard’s Lawrence Katz, one of America’s foremost labour economists. ‘They will be taking care of them in old age, fixing their home WiFi, or their air-conditioning, teaching or helping with their kids and serving them their food. It is not a very elegant prospect.'” (Thanks Browser.)