Last week, Americans went just a little crazy in convenience stores nationwide. The multi-state lottery game Mega Millions reached a record-high jackpot of $640 million, and some stores had trouble selling tickets fast enough. A prize that big, apparently, can make even the dumbest bets feel worthwhile.
The chance of winning a Mega Millions Jackpot is one in 175,711,536.
Most adults can manage cautious optimism, and it’s not always bad to have small hope for something wildly unlikely. Lottery clubs bring neighbors together, and the games themselves are sometimes fun enough to be a buck well spent.
But there is something strange about the government provision of the lottery. It seems like one thing to embrace a bad bet and another to have it encouraged by your trusted state authorities.
Lottery systems are popular tools with all the governments of dystopian stories, where hope becomes a tool to keep the oppressed poor complacent. President Snow, in The Hunger Games, makes the victorious tributes a key component of his government’s control of subjugated districts. One tribute, every year, emerges from the Hunger Games alive, and for the rest of his or her life that tribute is taken care of by the government with a big home, a bunch of money for food and fame to boot. Despite the overwhelming unlikelihood of winning – not to mention the requirement of killing children – the possibility of such a dramatic reversal of fortune gives the oppressed masses of Panem hope. That hope, largely vicarious, helps them accept the misery of their position.
Of course, oppression-by-lottery was done earlier – and probably better – in George Orwell’s 1984. In that future society, the lottery is quite effective at distracting Big Brother’s poorest and otherwise most miserable subjects. Members of the higher social castes – main character Winston included – know that the lottery’s a scam. In Orwell’s words, “Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons.”
In our real lottery, small sums are also usually the ones that get paid out. Every million won in Mega Millions translates to $38,500 per year before taxes, but most winners don’t hit the jackpot. More typical sums fall between $2 and $10,000.
Which makes Orwell’s deliberately unfair lottery seem uncannily similar to ours, especially considering that he wrote 1984 in 1949, some 15 years before American states began running official lotteries.
Since then, it has been pointed out a thousand times that our state lotteries are marketed to poor minorities. We now know that while many casual participants spend $1 or $2 a month, the bulk of lottery profits come from heavy, habitual gamblers. And we know that these gamblers are usually not rich or good at statistics.
Our real state lotteries aren’t designed to keep the poor complacent; they’re designed to make money – in most states for education.
But at some point, the difference between purposeful and knowing exploitation doesn’t really matter. False hope should probably not be what we use to pay our teachers.
Reach the columnist at john.a.gaylord@asu.edu
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