The Gambling Problem

Apparently, gambling is addictive.

A story discussing gambling amongst students was published this past Friday in the Daily Illini. Overall, the story emphasized that gambling is a problem in our country, especially amongst young people. However, I do not think the numbers add up. There was really only one paragraph that included statistics, but it left a few unanswered questions:

“About 2 percent of the adult population are addicted to gambling, or have a high affinity to become addicted to gambling, Kindt said. The percentage of young people, between the ages of 18 and 26, is even higher, at 4 to 6 percent.”

This information is attributed to a professor at our University. If I was the reporter for this story, I would have looked further into the statistics he provided for the story and followed up with him about any questions I had. Since the professor is at the University, it should have been fairly easy to clarify any questions.

Now perhaps my math is off, but when I looked into these gambling statistics, I was a little confused. What is the adult population in our country? According to the World Fact Book, updated July 2008, there are 101,825,901 men and 102,161,823 women in our country between ages 15-64. Lets say then that the adult population consists of about 150,000,000 if we subtract about 50,000,000 for ages 18-26. So if 2 percent of adults are addicted to gambling, that means 3,000,000 people have an addiction. This figure seems high to me. Three million is an extremely large number of people to have an addiction or high affinity to becoming addicted. However, I am also not well-versed in gambling, so maybe the problem is how this data is presented. I think it would have been beneficial to have quote or attributed information for Kindt stating what exactly qualifies someone as addicted; is it a very serious problem or does it just refer to the amount of people that gamble in general. Also, I would like to know how you can quantify the percent of people that could become addicted to gambling. I think it would be hard to measure mathematically and would be clearer with further explanation. In fact, if it is possible to separate the number of people that are actually addicted to gambling and those that could become addicted into two separate percents the data would also be stronger.

The next statistic states that 4 to 6 percent of younger people, ages 18-26, are addicted to gambling. Going back to the math I did from the World Fact Book information, this means that there are roughly 50,000,000 people between ages 18-26. This means that according to this data, it is possible that the same number of people in the total population is equal to the number of younger people that are addicted to gambling: between two and three million. Again, perhaps I am wrong, but this also seems rather high, depending on the definition of addicted.