“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is one of Mark Twain’s figurative stories. It’s about an infamous character, Jim smiley, an incurable gambler.
Jim Smiley is described as being extremely curious and would bet on anything that turned up provided he could get someone to bet against him. By all means, he had to place a bet and for inexplicable reasons he was lucky as he most always came out a winner.
Is our society slowly turning into Mark Twain’s allegorical ‘Jim Smiley’– a gambling society on almost every decision? Has the commercial world adopted guerrilla marketing techniques that border on what economists describe as casino economy?
With increased consumer information and proliferation of substitute products available to the burgeoning middle class, has selling the superficial product of ‘winning’ become easier than selling the product itself?
We are not privy to how much revenue companies rake in from such competitions. Accounting reporting standards are yet to catch up with this new revenue stream.
And what’s the role of the Betting Control Board in all this? Or are they just a symbolic reassurance of probity to the public by their black-suited presence in ‘draws’ and have minimal input in financial reporting? For its quite obvious published audited accounts of companies do not have betting board reports.
These competitions have all the telltale signs of neo-ponzi schemes, operating on regulatory greying area and preying on our greed and love for shortcuts.
Casinos, by law and established traditions, are required to publish the odds or chances of winning. For instance, placing a single bet on a number on a roulette table has (1 in 35) chance of winning. In other words if the ball lands on your chosen number, you win 35 times your bet. But even so, the table is slightly weighted against you, for zero is a participating number. So in reality, instead of having 34 chances of losing, it’s actually 35. So probability and law of averages favours the casino.
Gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and any form of addictive behaviour are as a result of over-stimulation of a specific area of brain that causes euphoric excitement. The ‘high’ of a gambler, though through a different approach, is the same euphoric ‘high’ of a heroine abuser and consistent stimulation of the specific area causes craving for the same ‘high’ hence causing addiction.
Research is begging on the impact of such competition on individuals, family and society. Empirical evidence points to broken families, bankruptcy, financial embarrassments and depression.
Mark Twain the story teller, and Mark Twain the journalist wore the same cap. He used what he described as the ‘The Golden Arm’ of storytelling to frighten society out of its shoes to the reality of social vices using allegorical stories.
In “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, he was attacking the gambling counter-culture of the 17th century backwater American mining towns. The main character, Jim Smiley, was not an honest gambler, but always had tricks up his sleeve until he found his match in a stranger who literally ‘weighted’ his specially trained jumping frog by filling it up with quail shot while Jim Smiley had gone to look for another frog for the stranger to bet on. Jim Smiley, for once, lost his bet.
It’s time to weight the hundreds of competitions by a legal regime that will compel all gaming companies to publish the odds of winning or losing for that matter.
