Looking for a resolution? Here’s one:
Stop playing the Lottery
Every day in the deli around the corner, poor people line up to buy lottery tickets. I was reminded of this sad fact by today’s NYTimes editorial exhorting states to eliminate their lotteries.
It has been said so many times and in so many ways that playing the lottery is dumb. It’s a “voluntary tax” or a “tax on people who can’t do math.” It’s gambling, but with very very very very very poor odds.
Want to know how poor the odds are? Just type “odds of winning lottery” into Google. The mathematicians agree not only that winning is less likely than getting struck by lightening, but (interestingly) that playing $50 in one lottery is actually a slightly better (but still absurd) strategy than betting $1 a week for 50 weeks.
If you need/want more money, you’re almost certainly better off mailing out a new resume every day at random than you are playing the lottery.
< -- end rant -->
2. January 2008 at :
But you’re taking too pragmatic an approach to the lottery. People don’t play the lottery actually expecting to win - they play hoping to win (and with that sentence I’ve just identified one of my great frustrations with Spanish - there is only one word for both ‘expect’ and ‘hope’). Playing the lottery is not about the expectation of winning money and it’s hardly even about gambling. It’s about the dream that comes with buying the ticket. Nearly everyone who has ever bought a lottery ticket (particularly for the big, big prizes) has listed off, at least in their own mind, what they will buy. That is the exciting part. It’s like paying a dollar to have a nice dream for a day or two.
Gambling in a casino is a similar experience for many people, but less about the lofty hopes of a dream and more about the excitation of playing a game where you can win money.
People who go to a casino or play the lottery in order to win money are called ‘problem gamblers.’ Their problem is not unlike the guy who goes into a bar every day and pisses away his paycheck on booze for no reason other than he likes the feeling of booze. But it doesn’t mean the rest of us should stop drinking alcohol.
2. January 2008 at :
I’ll buy that, but I would just change my argument into: there’s cheaper ways to purchase hope.
3. January 2008 at :
More then just “poor people” play the lottery on a regular basis…
4. January 2008 at :
Sure, but the ones around my corner are definitely not other than poor.