Book Review: The Ethics of Attention in an Age of Distraction: Why You Need to Get Out of Your Own Head

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew Crawford. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2015. Most of us think of distraction as a mere annoyance— a mild humming in the background while you work, a fly landing on your book while you read. We do not usually think of it carrying the weight of a serious moral problem. In his new book, The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford argues that our inability to pay attention does carry such moral weight, and he argues this precisely because it dissolves our individuality and our freedom

Royally Flushed. Reforming Gambling to Work For, Not Against, British Columbia

In Royally Flushed: Reforming gambling to work for, not against, British Columbia, think tank Cardus shows how the lowest-income households in B.C. pay the provincial government an estimated 4% of their annual incomes through gambling – twice the proportion that the wealthiest British Columbians hand over to the government though games of chance. B.C.’s income tax system, by contrast, taxes the wealthiest families at nearly six times the rate of the province’s poorest

Royally Flushed: Reforming Gambling to Work for, Not Against, Atlantic Canada

In Royally Flushed: Reforming Gambling to Work for, Not Against, Atlantic Canada, think tank Cardus shows how the lowest-income households in the Atlantic provinces pay their provincial governments an estimated 4% of their annual incomes through gambling – twice the proportion that the wealthiest Atlantic Canadians hand over to governments though games of chance. Atlantic provinces’ income tax systems, by contrast, tax the wealthiest families at nearly 10 times the rate of the region’s poorest

Royally Flushed: Reforming gambling to work for, not against, Alberta

In Royally Flushed: Reforming gambling to work for, not against, Alberta, think tank Cardus shows how the lowest-income households in Alberta pay the provincial government an estimated 7% of their annual incomes through gambling – triple the proportion that the wealthiest Albertans hand over to the government though games of chance. Alberta’s income tax system, by contrast, taxes the wealthiest families at nearly five times the rate of the province’s poorest

Pressing Its Luck: How Ontario Lottery and Gaming Can Work For, Not Against, Low-Income Households

In this paper, we tell the story of Ontario’s involvement with gambling and explore how it got hooked. The state has not always been the leading dealer in gambling or user of the revenue it produces. In fact, gaming’s path from an illegal and suppressed activity to a legal one, and its eventual transmogrification into a lean, mean, revenue machine having the government’s full support and encouragement, was circuitous and filled with ironies and unintended consequences

Turning Aces into Assets: Four Options to Help the Government Turn its Addiction to Gambling Revenue into Assets for the Poor

Government-run gambling is ripe for reform. In our previous report, “Pressing Its Luck,” we examined the ways in which the state’s gambling monopoly operates as a tax on the marginalized - preying on the poor and those who are playing hard to join them. We concluded by offering four policy reforms that could help provinces kick their addiction to regressive gambling profits and build a system that works for, not against, low-income households. Here, we provide a more detailed framework for recovery by exploring each policy option in depth. Returning annual gambling profits to the poor through cash transfers is one option. A second is to promote asset building through a matched savings program. Governments can also work with financial institutions to offer prize-linked savings products, an innovative way to help families build emergency savings funds. Finally, given that gambling profits are drawn disproportionately from problem gamblers, we argue that governments should increase funding for problem-gambling research, prevention, and treatment out of provincial gambling corporations’ marketing budgets

Alberta Gambling Research Institute Conference 2020: Freedom, Justice and Sovereignty in Gaming

The Alberta Gambling Research Institute's 19th Annual Conference "Freedom, Justice and Sovereignty in Gaming" was scheduled to take place in March, 2020 but was cancelled due to the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. A selection of conference presentations and research posters that were accepted for presentation at the event have been made available with the permission of the authors