The Business, Faith and Common Good Institute brought Kent Saunders to campus Halloween night to give a talk on the differences and similarities between gambling and investing.  He spoke to a full room of students.  Saunders, who teaches finance at Anderson University in South Carolina, has published on the relationship between gambling and investing from a biblical perspective, and that was the topic of his talk.

Saunders emphasized that typically investing is characterized by being a long-term strategy which risks money hopefully for the sake of win-win outcomes– where the investor makes a profit, and other people are also benefited (happy customers, etc).  Investment typically leads to overall growth– a general increase in wealth overall.  Gambling, on the other hand, is typically short term, has little societal benefit, and is typcially a zero-sum game, where one person wins at anothers loss.  No general increase is provided.

Bringing in the Biblical perspective was interesting.  Saunders brought up examples of investing, such as the parable of the talents, where the servant who invests wisely and increases his wealth is praised, while the servant who hides the money so he loses none is scolded (or worse).  He also brought up examples of gambling or potential gambling in the Bible, particularly the casting of lots which he pointed out does not seem to be gambling in the normal sense of that word.

Ultimately, Professor Saunders cautioned that more and more activities which are considered to be investing are in reality gambling,  because they are not long-term focused, they do not have societal benefit, they are zero-sum with a winner and a loser, rather than increasing economic growth overall.  Day-trading was one example he brought up.  Ticket scalping or other sorts of hoarding transactions might be other types.

Overall it was a stimulating talk and there were a lot of questions and insights from students afterwards.  We were very happy Professor Saunders made his first trip to Omaha to visit Creighton.