Americans spent $70 billion on lottery tickets last year — more than sports tickets, movies, books, games and music combined. Imagine what would happen if a politician announced $70 billion in new taxes?
Lotteries have always shown off the worst of human nature — more so with a $1.5B jackpot
— David Berry on the quieter payoff of Powerball,
If it’s any consolation to those of us who did not hold one of the three winning Powerball tickets, they’re not actually splitting $ 1.5 billion: after U. S. taxes on gambling winnings, the combined prize is only somewhere between $ 940 and $ 980 million. I mean, sure, it sounds impressive, but even if they all pooled their winnings, they would barely have enough for a new stadium complex in downtown Calgary, and real estate prices there are about as healthy as a duck covered in $ 30- a- barrel crude. I give those families three or four generations of gross financial mismanagement, tops, before they aren’t even worthy of a direct-stream connection to their collective frontal lobes, which is going to be next century’s equivalent of a reality show.
Let us quit stewing on the hideous unfairness of one of the other 292,201,338 completely random possibilities turning up, and stew instead on the ridiculous system of lotteries period, and the absolutely horrible things they say about us as a people.
I’m not even talking about the low-hum evil of the standard lottery setup, like for instance the fact the umbrella organization that runs Powerball recently goosed the odds, adding more numbers choose from, to make the grand prize harder to win and thus more likely to accrue to a gigantic payout. Sure, they only did because they know big cash prizes generate free attention (hi!) and increase sales, but hey, that’s not even in the top 10 of shady capitalist practices to be wrought in the last year.
I’m also not talking about the classic snooty denigration of games with a monumental improbability of winning as a tax on the poor and/or stupid (depending on which end of the political spectrum is doing the denigrating). Sure, in the U.S., for instance, the poorest third of households account for more than half of lottery tickets bought in a typical week (Canadian figures are less clear), but hey — sorry, I’ve been staring at my computer motionless for the last four hours contemplating the dystopian horror of a society that would dangle an essentially impossible dream of security and contentment in the face of its most thoroughly destitute and then mock them for numerical illiteracy. What were we talking about? Oh, right: idiots who buy lottery tickets. If we can look beyond the horrors and hypocrisies of the modern lottery system, though, we can find something more like a universal truth about the crooked timber of humanity. All evidence suggests that lotteries have been with us for nearly as long as civilization. Primitive lotteries — like essentially just drawing names out of a hat — show up in both the Old Testament and the Iliad. Non-fictional sources suggest evidence of more classic lotteries — buy a ticket, maybe win a prize — in both Han China and ancient Rome as early as the second century B.C. The practice popped up again in the 14th century in and around the Netherlands, where they skipped the pretence and just awarded people cold hard cash (or florins or tulips or whatever the Dutch used as money back then). The English word “lottery” is descended from the Dutch word “lot,” which meant “fate.”
But the true sickness is not in the mere existence, but in the purpose. It’s believed the Chinese may have used the funds to help construct the Great Wall; we know the Romans used the major lotteries to fix their city. The Dutch ran them expressly for the purposes of building walls and helping the poor; the first statewide English lottery, begun by Queen Elizabeth I, also was for the purpose of “publique good works.” The truth is now and always, lotteries have existed solely as a way to get people to pay for stuff they obviously need.
The real darkness here is that if you just straight-up ask humanity to do this kind of thing — pay for scholarships, provide arts funding — they are likely as not to spit in your face. Call it a tax or a user fee, and a solid half or more will accuse you of thinking you know better than they do about what they should be doing with their own money (in fact the Dutch considered lotteries a relatively painless, in the sense of little complaining, way to tax people). People in the U. S. spent $70 billion on lottery tickets last year — more than sports tickets, movies, books, video games and music combined. Imagine what would happen if a politician announced $70 billion in new taxes?
And the trick of it is the only thing you have to do to short-circuit this objection — as in, not even have it occur to most people — is give them a statistically negligible chance that some part of the benefits of that money will be theirs, and their alone. Building a wall to keep the Mongols out is nice and all, but then the guy next door is just as safe from Mongols as I am — what I really need is for all of us to be safe from Mongols and to have a bigger hut from which to laugh at those Mongols and perhaps also my neighbours.
What it amounts to is that playing the lottery is not so much about stupidity as it is selfishness, or at least the degree to which the latter effortlessly leads us into the former. The good news is, evidence indicates that this level of selfishness has only been with us for almost the entirety of human history. Good luck out there.