Interjecting itself before my planned first post this morning is the latest installment of the Ethics Alarms series in which your friendly neighborhood ethicist examines the biases that may make him (that is, me ) stupid, or not. At my local 7-11 just now on an emergency errand, I spied one of my next door neighbors purchasing lottery tickets. I have long suspected that he is an idiot, and this pretty much locked down my diagnosis.
Ethics Alarms has covered the issue of state lotteries extensively; you can see most of the results at this depressing tag. The most recent piece was in 2022, reacting to a CNN segment that declared state lotteries to be racist because a disproportionate percentage of the players are black. I believe that CNN’s analysis is racist, and I ended the post this way…
The lotteries exploit stupid people, uneducated people, desperate, lazy people, people who don’t understand probabilities and don’t get the concept of differed gratification or investment. Being black or brown doesn’t make people victims of the lotteries. All you have to do is be smart enough to say, “No…this is nuts. It’s like throwing money away. I’ll save the money I would have used on lottery tickets, and then I can do something useful with it.” It’s not a difficult concept. Parents should be teaching that to their kids as soon as they are old enough to have money.
Responsible parents (and community leaders) should also explain how lottery winners almost always blow everything they win, and how they almost never step up the class ladder because they don’t know how to handle money, save it, spend it wisely, or keep the swarms of desperate relatives and friends away once they find out that good ‘ol Whoever has more money than he “needs.” They blow their winnings for the same reasons they played the lotteries, and for the same reasons they felt they had to play the lotteries. Bad judgment. Poor choices.
I see people dressed in near rags buying 20 and 40 bucks of scratch-off lottery tickets virtually every time I go the 7-11. It makes me crazy; I have come close many times to interrupting and asking, “What’s the matter with you?”
Well, I know what’s the matter with my neighbor (who is as white as white can be). He’s a boob, and buying lottery tickets proves it.
I’ll file this bias in the “Completely Justified” drawer.
Ethics Alarms 
If I won a million dollars in the lottery, I am confident I could appropriately handle it. The kicker is that because I can appropriately handle large sums of money, I don’t play the lottery!
Every couple years, I go to the casino and spend $5 on the penny slots. Watching $5 disappears helps remind how frivolous gambling is. I mean, I don’t really begrudge people their gambling; most forms of entertainment cost money. Gambling is just a bit more direct about how the money to stimulation ratio.
In my case, though, the blinking lights and beeping noises mean nothing to me, so I get nothing out of the experience. Most of the time, I just press the button (they don’t even have a lever anymore!) and a penny at a time disappears. Sometimes a few pennies, even a buck or two reappears, but only once did it ever get above my initial, well, investment (maybe up to $10). Paying $5 bucks to press a button 500 times seems like pretty shitty entertainment.
Incidentally, my dad once won the jackpot. He was mostly embarrassed as the machine blinked and beeped maniacally. He too played a penny slot; the jackpot: $5.00!
In our first year of marriage (over a decade ago), we went to see a comedian whose show was at a casino. My wife had never gambled in her life, so on the way out she begged to try. I figured this would be a great opportunity to demonstrate the frivolity and waste that was casino gambling.
She sat at a slot machine with $20. Within 30 minutes she had $1,300.
So much for the lesson.
Anyway, we haven’t gambled since. So maybe it worked just not as expected.
Here is North Carolina there was a lot of bipartisan opposition to starting a state lottery. This was back in the mid to late 2000s as I recall, and the Democrats, having suborned a House member to switch parties, were still running the state. It was late in the week and they passed the word to (mostly) Republicans that there wouldn’t be any more votes that week. Something like that, I do not recall the details, but House members were going back home for a few days.
That’s when the Democratic leadership had the legislature vote on setting up the lottery, and it just did pass. Stuff such as this, and how my county supervisors (also Democrats, coincidentally) passed a sales tax increase for the county under cover of darkness.
It is no wonder that the Democratic party kept itself in power since their red shirt insurrection in 1898 that overthrew the elected Republican/black coalition in Wilmington and the rest of the state. We forget about that one, but it really was an armed, organized coup that overthrew the duly elected government. And they were quite proud of it at the time.
It took a decisive wave election in 2010 to put Republicans in power in the state government — and they’ve still had trouble keeping the governorship, but they do now again have a supermajority in the state legislature — in part due to Democratic policies opposing school choice.
I have no patience for them any longer. They have forfeited any consideration, at least at the state level.
About 18 years ago when I was dating my wife, I took her up to Niagara Falls to meet my grandparents. We were getting pretty serious, and I thought it would be best that she meet that part of the family and while she was more than gracious, she wanted to go visit Canada having never been before. So we made a day of it. Across the boarder is the tourist trap of a place where we did silly things like visit a haunted house, 4d ride, and other things that had nothing to do with Canada. However, as we were walking around, we learned that in Canada you only have to be 19 to enter a casino that was just down the street.
Having never been in one (she was only 20 at the time) she thought it would be worth while, and I thought hey we got some Canadian money, might as well spent it instead of of trying to convert it back. She goes up to 1 slot machine, sticks a twenty in, tries to figure out how pull the handle (there was no handle) touches the screen, and wins $450 bucks after having been converted back into dollars having done absolutely nothing of note.
I don’t remember what happened with the money, but I do remember the two of us leaving and never going back. The next time she would gamble it would be on our honeymoon. We took a Caribbean cruise. We both entered a blackjack tournament and having never played blackjack before, she of course got first place with a $500 prize.
I don’t know what the odds of either thing happening, but I’m sure they are both on their own very improbable. A couple of times over the years, we would go to Vegas or some other place where gambling was allowed and we never did as well as she did on her first two times.
Just two thoughts of wisdom on all of this. 99.99999999999% you will lose. Apparently my wife existence is that 0.000000000000001%.
Even if you win, you’re still likely to lose. If we had done this on a regular basis, I’m sure that money would had just been pumped back into the casino. That’s human behavior. The best bet is to not play at all.
(I changed “Nigeria Falls” to those other big falls shared by the US and Canada. I hope that was the actual destination.)
lol yeah that’s okay. I’m a terrible speller.
Give yourself more credit. You spelled “Nigeria” correctly!
My wife is good at blackjack. She can go to a casino and play 6 hours on $40. Sometimes she even leaves with more than $40. At that rate, I consider it entertainment. She tells of all the Chinese people at the casino that play $500/hand. She wonders where they get all that money. I tell her she probably doesn’t want to know and she definitely better not ask.
It starts with the letter “L” and rhymes with “Laundering”
Two words. The first starts with h and ends in man, the second starts with a t and ends in -ing. That and illegal marijuana grows, which go hand in hand with the first.
Remember when they used to use ‘think of the children’ to push the lottery. The lotteries were supposed to bring in revenue for education. However, study after study found that money was subtracted from education for every lottery dollar added, so not a dime went to education.
Now, there seems to be a lot of fraud in the lottery. Eddie Tipton rigged the lottery and claimed at least 5 jackpots before being caught. There is a lot of talk about the fact that California seems to get about 1/2 the Powerball winnings to tax. The Pennsylvania lottery was fixed by weighting some of the balls so that they wouldn’t be chosen. A real-estate investor was gaming the lottery in Michigan and had 500 winning tickets for one jackpot. Another Michigan man gamed the system for $26 million. Untold numbers of clerks have told people their cards weren’t winners, then pocketed the winning tickets. In a Maine case, a man bought a ticket, the clerk stole it, the man figured he lost it and bought a second ticket with the same numbers and both tickets won. The fraud was discovered because it was suspicious that both winning tickets were sold at the same store. Canada found that hundreds of lottery ‘insiders’ were claiming jackpots (meaning the lottery is rigged). A Stanford statistician has won 4 lottery jackpots. The California State Lottery paid out millions to people who didn’t have tickets. When investigators questioned this, the investigators were fired. A father and son in Massachusetts turned in over 13,000 winning lottery tickets. Texas is undergoing a scandal because their scratch-off game gave instructions as to what a winning card was. The company running the lottery insists that what the card states is a winner is NOT what is a winner.
So, now we come to the DC Powerball $340 million issue. A man bought a ticket on the 6th, didn’t watch the drawing on the 7th, but checked the official website on the 8th to find that he had the winning numbers. Those winning numbers were on the site for 3 days. Now, the lottery is saying that the numbers on the official website are NOT the winning numbers. Huh, I wonder if ‘SOMEONE’ was supposed to claim the jackpot with the website numbers and they didn’t expect Mr. Nobody to show up with a winning ticket. Is this how a certain political party is getting funded now that FTX is bankrupt?
Gambling is rigged. With all that money in an ethic-free environment, it would be a miracle if it wasn’t.
I occasionally play the lottery, but the pay-out has to be in the high millions, low billions, or what is the point?
And, the point is not any suspicion that I will win, but the few days of idle fantasy about what I would do if I did.
And, I am pretty sure that I am one of those people that is smart enough to blow through the winnings. Why am I pretty sure? Because I would take the I would take the 30-year annuity on the ground that I may be dumb enough to blow through all the winnings.
Is it a waste of money? Probably, but less expensive than other frivolous items of expenditure.
And, by analogy, it may not be such a waste (for someone who plays as infrequently as I do). I used to play poker regularly with a bunch of friends. We would play poker for 5 or 6 hours and would typically not lose more than $20.00. Pretty cheap for an evening of entertainment.
And, of course, I can rationalize it. A typical complaint is that the odds of winning are so slim that only the mathematically illiterate (the Innumerate) would buy a ticket. However, that logic only works up to a point. There comes a point where the potential pay-off exceeds the risk.
For example, if one bets on the roll of a die (pick a number 1-6), a $1.00 bet that pays less than $6.00 is a bad bet; every bet in Vegas is bad, but some are worse than others. One can justify an entertainment value if the the risk of loss is low (imagine a pay-off of $5.90 for a $1.00 bet). Then, there is the really bad bet where winning on the roll of a die wins you a dollar. Those kind of odds are hard to justify and could be evidence of poor math comprehension. However, either case could be described as a stupid bet.
Now, if a $1.00 bet wins you $6.00, that would seem to be a fair bet (and one that requires little justification for making).
But, imagine a roll of the die that pays off $10.00, making your odds of losing in the long run smaller than average. The mathematically savvy person should be compelled to place such a bet, no?
Going back to the lottery, let’s say the odds of winning the lottery is 1 in 560 Million (different lotteries have different odds). If the the price to purchase a ticket is $1.00, then, if the jackpot exceeds $560 Million, the mathematically astute person would be compelled to purchase a ticket, no? If math can compel you not to play, why can’t it compel you to do so, as well?
I proposed this line of reasoning several years back on Amy Alkon’s blog and all of the people who derided lottery players as idiots hurled all sorts of insults at me.
I don’t think they understand math as well as they think they did.
-Jut
Of course, if you’re not on welfare, living paycheck to paycheck, and spending a disproportionate amount of money on liquor, drugs and sex, the calculations are different. Poor, irresponsible, desperate and stupid people see smart, successful and seemingly responsible people playing the lottery and conclude, “See? it’s smart, responsible and reasonable to play!” It’s near to my attitude about recreational drug use, which was pushed overwhelmingly by elite, well-off, upper-middle class liberals. The old adage is that when the white upper-middle class gets a cold, the less affluent get pneumonia. The people I mostly see playing the lottery in mu neighborhood are black, shabbily dressed and checking out two sixpacks of malt liquor and cigarettes.
I miss Amy’s blog.
You just described the plot of Jerry and Marge Go Large.
They’ve hopefully rectified the problem of lotteries having odds that ensure someone wins if they buy enough tickets.
I join in my office’s pool when the pot gets absurdly large. It seems like a small amount to chip in towards camaraderie. And even though I know we’ll never win, a small part of me is thinking about how lousy it would feel to suddenly wind up being the only non-millionaire at the office.
Reminds me of my fruitless effort nearly 40 years ago to help a prospective client establish a very modest ($25/month) investment program.
She: “We just can’t afford it.”
Me: (observing 5 scratch-off tickets on the kitchen table) “How often do you buy those?”
She: (big smile creases her face) “We (hubby & three kids) each get one per week.”
Me: “There’s $25 a month.”
She: (smile immediately vanishes) “I told you, we just can’t afford it.”
Me: (conceding no sale) “Here’s my card, let me know if things change.”
PWS
How’s this for even more long term “gambling” vs “investment”.
I know a family who put both their kids aggressively into club sports. As soon as one league ended, they enrolled into another. Often running 3-5 seasons in a single year. Each club is a couple thousand dollars of membership not to mention paying for travel and lodging for distant tournaments.
When asked why so aggressive about it, the response is that they want their kids to be competitive for sports scholarships to college.
This has been going on since age 5 and now one kid got a *modest* scholarship to a *middling* college, and hates the sport they’ve been playing their whole life and it doesn’t look like the other kid will be getting a scholarship.
I did not have the chutzpah to show them the math of taking the multiple thousands of dollars per year for 12 years per kid and investing it into college accounts VS gambling on a sports scholarship, that even if won, mostly likely won’t equal the investment.