Don't count on winning the lottery any time soon

A young woman is in line at the gas station. She dresses in stylish yet economical outfits from her local Mega-mart, and probably balances her checkbook. As she stands at the counter, she suffers a sudden and profound lapse in judgment; she buys a lottery ticket.

The lottery, as many people say, is a voluntary tax on people who don’t understand math. In a less tactful mouth, it may be called “idiot tax.” The same can be said for many forms of gambling, but the lottery is particularly useless because it’s run by the state government.

People may say they play the lottery for the thrill, or because it gives money to the state; the real reason is that humans are swayed by hope, the cruelest of emotions. Lottery advertising campaigns exploit this hope. Another tragic aspect of the human condition is to assume that we are special, that God loves us, so this time we’re going to be the big winner. Lotteries fall in the realm of statistics, which is in the realm of mathematics, where the mathematician and the computer reign supreme. If asked if they believe in a god, they might tell you that math is God. And no, math does not love you.

The Minnesota Lottery web site (http://www.lottery.state.mn.us/) is at least kind enough to post the approximate odds. If there are four out of six winning numbers on a powerball ticket, the prize is $100. The lucky winner collects $59.10, before taxes are withheld. Feeling lucky? The odds of winning that shocking sum are one in 12,000.
The web site also has a Q&A page. The first question asks if it’s more likely to be hit by lightning than to win the jackpot. The answer says no, that 1136 people won $1 million or more in North American lotteries in 1996, and that only 91 people were killed by lightning. If you don’t have a calculator handy, I’ll tell you why this is a giant steaming pile of dung. There are 442.5 million people in the United States, Canada and Mexico, so a whopping 0.000002 percent of people in North America won lotteries and 0.0000002 percent were struck by lightning. One order of magnitude in this context makes no difference, and considering the misfortune that befalls many lottery winners, a lightning strike would be a blessing. Don’t pray to win the lottery, pray to be the conduit of 30 to 50 kiloamperes of current between a storm and Earth. If you don’t die, you’ll have a much more interesting story that doesn’t end in you being killed for your lottery winnings.|

It’s the Lottery’s hope that everyone is as hopelessly optimistic as Han Solo; “Never tell me the odds!” That particular scene in Star Wars fools everyone into thinking that C-3P0’s silly statistics don’t mean anything. That’s right, with enough spunk and rugged good-looks, you’ll always be able to successfully navigate an asteroid field populated by giant interstellar worms.

“Alright,” someone might say, “so I probably/definitely/most certainly won’t win the jackpot, but at least the revenues are helping to fund education and the environment and all that.” This may be somewhat true, but our state lottery has been very inefficient with it’s spending. In 2004, the Minnesota Legislative Auditor found major problems with the lottery. For every dollar of lotto ticket sales revenue, about 13 cents to 14 cents went to operating expenses. Other state lotteries operate on about 8 cents per dollar of sales revenue. In the auditors report, it described how revenue that could have gone to the state General Fund (education, environmental trust fund, etc.) was actually being spent. 11 Lottery employees were allowed to use state vehicles for their commute, and some commuted 20,000 miles per year. There were excessive office expenses, and the former director was reimbursed for lodging and meals at a fishing tournament with little or no promotional value for the Lottery, and the list goes on.

Prize money, that 59.1 percent of Lottery sales revenue, gets spent just as wisely. The big jackpots are blown on expensive cars, loans to family members and drugs. What do you suppose happens when a moron wins $7 million? Or even a very excited person of average intelligence? They scream in joy and wave their winning ticket in front of every camera they see while they waddle to the gas station where they purchased it. When someone with a cool head wins the lottery, we don’t hear a single word from them ever after. When someone... not so cool-headed wins, they gush their name to the Lottery organizers, who spray it all over the evening news. Family, friends and strangers inundate the jackpot winner, and if the poor soul is cursed with any form of kindness, their winnings dissipate into the ether without so much as a thank-you card. Anything left is spent on everything except equitable assets.

We gamble all the time, and there are many ways to do it. Going to college is a very expensive wager that you will graduate and make enough money to justify the college expense. We wager our lives when we drive a car, our checking accounts when we invest in stocks, and our hearts when we confess love for someone.
Back to the young woman at the gas station: After she asks the clerk for the lottery ticket, she sees the Humane Society jar on the counter. She shakes her head, remembering that the lottery is stupid, and puts her dollar in the jar. She knows that dollar will have a much better chance of saving a puppy in the pound than instantly winning her $15 million worth of trouble.