Forget the winners, it’s losers who need advice

Spend $100 on Lotto and you only get, on average, $55 back in prizes. Imagine if we had an income tax that taxed you 45c in the dollar. People would go berserk ...

It’s over! The panic buying, the supermarket queues and the worry have come to an end. I’m talking, of course, about Saturday’s big Lotto draw. As queues stretched out the door, as apps and websites crashed, the national hysteria finally abated when two big winners were found. We can all now take it easy – until the next big Powerball jackpot.

Our country’s infatuation with Lotto speaks volumes. We think we are a largely egalitarian lot – even if we’re far less egalitarian than we previously were. But we love a Lotto winner. Once we’ve got over the short-term jealously, we wish the instant millionaires the best of luck. And they’ll need it, as quite a few winners will be skint in a few years’ time thanks to too much generosity and too many stupid investment decisions.

If you ever do win a large amount of money, you’ll need good financial advice. Luckily, even though there were only two big winners on Saturday night, they got lots of free personal advice before the event from our media. Financial advisers, previous winners and Lotto spokespeople all chimed in with strategies for dealing with a big win.

But where was the advice for the millions of losers? ‘‘Next time it’s probably best you don’t spend the kids’ lunch money on Lotto.’’ ‘‘Put the rent money in a jar marked ‘rent’ so you don’t mistakenly spend it on 400 bucks’ worth of Lucky Dips.’’ ‘‘Look on the bright side, a small proportion of the money you spent is going to assist various arts and cultural organisations whose ticket prices are too high for you to attend, especially now you’ve lost on Lotto.’’

I propose we make all these hifalutin cultural organisations who receive Lottery Board funds hold special events for Lotto losers. All you have to do to gain admission to the symphony concert/ ballet/opera/museum exhibition is to show a losing ticket. Other cultural organisations have special events for sponsors, and Lotto losers are clearly the most generous sponsors of all.

I have heard Lotto described as a tax on stupidity and, when you check the numbers – no, not your Lotto numbers but the statistics on where Lotto money goes – it appears to be true. Spend $100 on Lotto and you only get, on average, $55 back in prizes. Imagine if we had an income tax that taxed you 45c in the dollar. People would go berserk, yet we’re quite happy to see our Lotto money essentially taxed at that rate. Even the TAB gives back more money. And compared to Lotto, casinos are positively generous in how much they return to the punter.

I suspect the reason we waste billions on Lotto is that many of us are numerically challenged. We don’t realise the incredibly long odds of winning even a small prize. And we love the mumbo-jumbo about lucky numbers and lucky shops.

In my maths teaching days, I used to enjoy announcing to my class that I had chosen my Lotto numbers for the week. I would then write 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and bonus number 7 on the board. There would be howls of protest from the teenagers. ‘‘You can’t do that; you’ll never win.’’

So I would rub the numbers out and write 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 and 40 on the board. ‘‘You can’t do that, either,’’ they would scream. ‘‘You must evenly spread numbers.’’ As I wrote 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 35 and 40 on the board there would be more howls. ‘‘It’s got to be random.’’

Even though I explained, in fact mathematically proved, that my numbers were just as likely to win as any set of seven random numbers that the class would come up with, my advice largely fell on deaf ears. But even worse than the mathematical stupidity that Lotto encourages is the political stupidity. Last week, well-intentioned lefties were saying that $50 million was too much for one person to win; it would be fairer for 50 people to win a million because that is ‘‘all you need’’ to be happy.

Don’t these misguided socialist fools realise that Lotto, introduced in 1987 at the height of Rogernomics, is a pillar of capitalism? People getting more than they need thanks to a bit of good luck, an accident of birth, or a government too scared to regulate them is the very foundation of our capitalist, laissez-faire system.

Though I rarely buy Lotto tickets myself, every now and again, like most New Zealanders, I wonder how life would change if I did win big. Would I stop working? No. Would I swap fish and chips on Friday nights for high-class restaurants? No. Would I move house? No.

What is amazing to me is not how much people’s lives would change with a big Lotto win but for many of us – apart from paying off the mortgage early and helping out a few friends and family – how little it would change.