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Earl Grinols
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Earl Grinols is a Distinguished Professor at Baylor University. His main focus of research and analysis has been on the effect of legalized casinos in the United States.
He attended the University of Michigan for undergraduate study, and received two summa cum laude degrees from the University of Minnesota in economics and mathematics. In 1997 he earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977.
Grinols has worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, MIT, the University of Illinois, Department of the Treasury. He was also a Senior Economist on the Council of Economic Advisors. "He was a founding member and first president of Illini Christian Faculty and Staff at the University of Illinois and presently serves as president of The Association of Christian Economists," according to [citizenlink.org].
Grinols, in 1994, testified to Congress about the negative effects of casinos. In 1998, he successfully lobbied for Congress to create the National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC). Despite Grinols' previous research suggesting a causal link between the advent of legalized casino gambling and a rise in pathological gamblers, the commission found " . . . the casino effect is not statistically significant for any of the … crime outcome measures . . . " This finding, along with several other findings that seem to absolve casinos of being a cause of societal ills has raised controversy and aroused suspicion that congress was protecting the monied interests of casinos.
Some have accused his cost/benefit analyses casinos as being narrowminded as they assume that the costs associated with pathological gamblers are caused by casinos. However, Grinols, along with Professor John Kindt defend their more than 3,000 county analyses as controlling for all possible variables. As one defender of the study stated "To prove a causal link beyond this study is impossible. This is the most exhaustive study to date. Additionally, in this [discussion] we are operating under a paradigm of empiricism as a source for truth. I concede that under a Socratic paradigm, this study is inconclusive. However, such a paradigm is impractical in the world of research, which is why we have statistics. And you'd be hard pressed to find a better statistician than professor Grinols."
In February of 2007, Grinols became somewhat of a celebrity in the Speech and Debate universe. The Public Forum Debate topic for that month was "Resolved: The costs of legalized casino gambling in the Unites States outweigh the benefits." Because of having a high score on Google's PageRank algorithm, Grinols' research was a favorite amongst debaters. Despite having anti-casino conclusions, Grinols' research was used on both sides of the debate, a testament to his credibility some have surmised.