ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the highly complex question of gambling, and the chapter takes it first in the simple and undisguised form which it assumes at the gaming-table. Gambling is a machinery for carrying money from where it is more to where it is less significant, and insurance is a machinery for carrying it from where it is less to where it is more significant. The difference between staking on the green table and speculating on the Stock Exchange or the turf, is simply that in the two latter cases an element of judgment may enter, though it seldom really does. The communal income, then, though measured by marginal significances in gold, is constituted by the marginal significance of everything made, produced, or done, that enters into the circle of exchange. The mere fact of a thing being desired by a number of wealthy men gives it a high marginal value objectively.
