
Lotteries: America's $70B Shame - samsolomon
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotteries-americas-70-billion-shame/392870/?single_page=true
======
dade_
My mother used to bring me to a United Church every Sunday when I was growing
up. The United Church does not accept proceeds from gambling. As this
obviously contradicted my parents buying lottery tickets and the famous
Catholic Church bingo events, I asked our minister why. He said, "It is
because those who gamble the most can afford it the least." I've never found
gambling interesting or exciting, but over 2 decades later and I am certain it
is true.

~~~
hitekker
A small anecdote that shines a light on the core of lotteries.

Very nice.

------
WavingThe44
A few thoughts:

1\. Even if it were illegal, many people would still play the lotteries:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game)
, only the profit would go to criminals.

2\. The "Sin Tax" (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_tax)
) on lotteries, like all sin taxes (i.e. cigarettes, alcohol), is highly
regressive and hostile to the poor.

~~~
mc32
So maybe a hybrid approach would be to keep them legal and monopolized by the
state but simultaneously run PSA and adverts as well as emblazon labels on the
tickets about the ills they visit upon the buyers.

And so a successful lottery organization would be one which eventually drove
itself out of business.

~~~
lxmorj
Or just take a smaller cut and spread the winnings thinner so that the
expected value is closer to the actual spending. Change it so that they have
to be scratched to win (instead of buying and scanning), or institute other
limiting factors.

------
yuzi
I've been purchasing a lotto ticket every week for a decade at least. At some
point I realized I wasn't playing to win a much as I was playing for the
entertainment value (Actually I discovered this when I realized I had a years
worth of unchecked tickets in my drawer and needed to check them before they
expired.)

Really... If buying a ticket lets you take a break and day dream 'what if'
scenarios then it's not only a de-stressor it also gets you to think outside-
the-box and discover ideas that do help you in practical ways. I'd say my un-
won tickets turned out to be a better investment than many other comparable
expenditures, like for example drinking fucking pop.

~~~
iandanforth
This. Lotteries are "The Tax that's Fun to Pay."

I would love to see the Federal Government get into this game. Specifically,
everyone who files a tax return gets a ticket to the national lottery. File
early? Get two! Low income household? Get 3!

Income re-distribution and increased tax revenue in one shot.

~~~
icebraining
Not a tax return, but in Brasil and Portugal, you get a lottery ticket for
submitting receipts of purchases (all businesses are required to submit them,
the lottery is a way to catch infringers). The Portuguese IRS is giving out a
luxury car every week:
[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/30834f5a-919f-11e3-8fb3-00144feab7...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/30834f5a-919f-11e3-8fb3-00144feab7de.html)

------
jwatte
I don't play the lottery for expected value, I play it for variance. No other
"investment" comes even close. So, spending $1 of investment on that buys a
lot of potential upside.

~~~
frou_dh
With you on that. Have never understood the incredulous stance some people
take on the very concept of buying a lottery ticket ("tax on stupid" etc).

Addiction and/or spending-money-one-doesn't-have are separate matters from the
legitimacy of the game.

------
jjxw
The reasoning behind why lotteries can be damaging to the socioeconomically
disadvantaged is similar to that of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. It
offers an escape and "hope", as some have put it for the lottery, but there is
almost an infinitesimally small chance that something good will come out of
it.

The problem with this is not people playing the lottery in general (even if it
is objectively throwing away money). I've even bought into the office pool a
few times more as "social insurance" than anything else. The problem IS that
the lottery takes advantage of those who need that marginal dollar the most
under the pretense of funding state education, which, according to John
Oliver, doesn't even seem to be true[1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-
netuhHA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PK-netuhHA)

~~~
jessaustin
For hundreds of years, one of the primary motivations of social policy seems
to have been depriving the poor and politically-weak of their small pleasures.
There are other motivations too, but nearly everything that has been done to
and for the disenfranchised can be summarized thus, so it seems a parsimonious
explanation.

------
smaddox
It would be interesting to see the actual distributions instead of just
averages.

Demographics would also be interesting (although I doubt they have this data);
is the spending really dominated by a wide poor base, or is it dominated by a
few middle class "whales"? Especially in the smaller states, where the per
capita average is much higher, I suspect that there are some middle class
outliers.

~~~
Spooky23
Overall the demographic is similar to slot machines and cigarettes. Older
people play 3/4 draw numbers, younger folks do scratch off games.

Lotteries don't scale up well to "scratch" the gambling itch that rich people
have. You have to buy at retail, and the quantities are setup for casual play
or hard cases only.

A guy in a suit dropping $500 on tickets at the gas station is going to draw
negative attention. Dropping $500 on the craps table makes you feel like a big
shot.

------
rdlecler1
What the article doesn't address is what a lottery ticket might give people:
hope. And that's what you might need to get up the next day when you are poor.
That said, targeting poor neighborhoods to extract more money from them does
seem shameful.

~~~
callumlocke
Hope is an optimistic word for this. I think it would be more accurate to say
idle thrill. Passive daydreaming about going from nothing to millions
overnight (due to external factors you can't even influence except by buying a
ticket) doesn't really count as 'hope' in my view. It's a bit like saying
drinking helps people to avoid problems. I mean, technically it does...

------
CuriousSkeptic
Since the market economy is supposed to search for Pareto optimality (local
optima) why not view the lottery as a way to find a better global optima by
randomly kicking the system out of its local optima. Similar to how annealing
[1] uses random jumps.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing)

------
Spooky23
...but sports book regulation is noxious government interference.

------
CM30
Maybe it's just me, but I never got the attitude a lot of people have here. I
mean, is playing the lottery a foolish decision? Sure, but for the most part
it's pretty cheap, and offers the smallest amount of hope for something
better. More than you can say about a lot of other alternatives...

People know they're (most likely) not going to win. It's just a bit of fun,
and slightly less awkward than having to got to a casino.

~~~
yborg
And I never understood the "fun" part. It's "fun" for the 10 seconds it takes
to check the numbers, maybe. You'd get a lot more entertainment taking 10
singles and tossing them over a railing at the mall and watching the resulting
show.

~~~
97s
This made my night. That is exactly how I feel. I just spit out my drink
reading this comment. Id rather just go give random people a dollar sand see
their reaction.

------
eximius
Lotteries, and these distributions of lotto spending, aren't a problem.
They're a symptom of a larger problem in the cultural divide between
socioeconomic and racial classes from which a significant amount of this
country's problems can be tracked back to.

------
cmurf
This is ironic, people think they're being selfish but in actuality they're
being servile.

------
Pitarou
I always considered the lottery a tax on irrationality.

~~~
chrisbennet
It's a tax on people who are bad at statistics.

