Goodbye Sweet Sunglasses by emdot. CC-BY.

Earl Grinols and David Mustard are economists and, like a lot of people, intrigued by both casinos and crime. In their case, they were especially curious about whether the first causes the second. It does, according to their study. Eight percent of crime occurring in counties that have casinos results from the legalized gambling. In strictly financial terms—which are the ones they’re comfortable with as economists—the cost of casino-caused crime is about $65 per adult per year in those counties.Earl Grinols and David Mustard, “Measuring Industry Externalities: The Curious Case of Casinos and Crime,” accessed June 7, 2011: http://casinofacts.org/casinodocs/Grinols-Mustard-Casinos_And_Crime.pdf.

When casinos come to town, the following specific crimes increase:

• Robbery (in all three major categories: of individuals, of their homes, of their cars)
• Aggravated assault
• Rape

The crimes also increased to some extent in neighboring counties.

Situation: A casino regular runs out of money after a string of bad cards. She coasts out to the street and drops her purse in front of an out-of-towner. When the chivalrous guy bends over to pick it up for her, she picks his back pocket. With the $100 stolen from the wallet, she heads back into the casino, spends $40 on hard liquor, loses the rest at the roulette table, and goes home. She wakes up alone, though some underwear she finds on her floor makes her think she probably didn’t start the night that way. She can’t remember.

PRACTICE QUESTIONS

1. The woman in the story is your eighteen-year-old daughter. Does that change any of your answers?
2. Pigouvian taxes (named after economist Arthur Pigou, a pioneer in the theory of externalities) attempts to correct externalities—and so formalize a corporate social responsibility—by levying a tax equal to the costs of the externality to society. The casino, in other words, that causes crime and other problems costing society, say, $1 million should pay a $1 million tax.
   • In terms of casinos, would such a tax more or less satisfy any ethical claim that could be made against them for the social problems they cause? Why or why not?
   • The way these social scientists measured the cost of each crime was, more or less, by totaling the quantifiable costs—that is, those things that could receive a price tag fairly readily. If, for example, your car gets stolen and sold for parts by a desperate gambler, you can put a price on the crime’s cost by checking the car’s Kelly Blue Book value. Added to that there are administrative costs—at the police station, the insurance company—and those too may be figured in terms of time and wages. Still, quite a bit of the cost of crime escapes (as the authors readily admit) their measure. Their calculations don’t include lost productivity, social service, and welfare costs. They also don’t include emotional costs, the tears, and distress of the victim. Is there any way for those costs—especially the emotional suffering—to be put into dollars and cents? If so, how? If not, is there some other kind of requirement that could be strapped onto casinos to help make them socially responsible for their activities?