Mega Million Letdown

A couple of weeks ago, millions of people in the United States were buzzing with the prospect of winning a $640 million jackpot lottery. The Mega Millions contest spanned states all over the country, and the thought of putting oneself in a position having more money that could conceivably be spent in a single life brought people to kiosks and convenience stores in droves. Of course, this madness ignored the logic of minuscule likelihood of matching numbers successfully and the oddity that people who never paid the lottery before would somehow play now that it reached $640 million. Or put another way, I guess that a measly $30 million or so isn't quite worth winning.

But the excitement of lottery, some of which I saw first hand, made me a little bit uneasy and frankly a little sad.

First of all, I'll repeat what's been said and articulated many times in the midst of this madness: the lottery is a voluntary tax. Or put another way, this is a vehicle to take money out of the pockets of citizens to support municipal projects, with a sideshow benefit of making a lottery player (or a couple of lottery players) rich. It's very little different than a raffle, except that in most cases, I see people purchasing raffle tickets because they support the cause which is being supported, as opposed to really wanting a gift certificate at Macy's.

The other thing that alarms me is the reaction both before and after the lottery drawing from people who are lower income. As the previously reference article mentions, "this increasing reliance on lotteries to fund state governments is troubling, as these taxes disproportionately fall on low-income individuals." Most people who are educated realize the mathematical über-unlikelihood of winning the lottery, and if they're going to play a game where there's a high likelihood of losing, they'd just as soon invest in the stock market, where they can use some of their know-how to make their chances of "winning" far greater. At least much better than the 1 in 176 million odds that Mega Millions gives you.

I had some of the people in my office who were excited to play, and it was led by an administrative assistant who was an older single-mother of a teen. This colleague - God bless her - really got into the excitement of the prospect of winning and managed to zealously recruit over 75 people in our floor to play (and I did chip in my $2 contribution), sending out e-mails around our press conference plans and how we should use positive thinking ("Don't say if we when", she would insist, "We should talk about when we win how we'll spend the money"). I'm sure she knew the odds, but she was pretty psyched about us winning that jackpot, which she had calculated out the payout and had dutifully provided each of the participants copies of the selected numbers. She was much less subdued coming into the office on Monday morning, realizing that she would not be able to quit her job and purchase a mansion in Westchester.

I don't know her heart, and I don't know the heart of everyone who played the lottery last week - and as I mentioned, I did chip in $2 for the office pool. But there's something about the mania for lottery windfalls that's troubling, akin to the novice poker player who thinks he's going to be the next Phil Ivey or Johnny Chan, and make millions as a professional, only to realize that he's managed to waste gobs of time and money in a fruitless exercise which would have been better spent elsewhere.

It's also the seductive "get rich quick" nature of the game which seems antithetical to other messages that society tries to preach. On one hand, teachers and civic leaders tell kids that the road to success is a marathon, not a sprint. "Study hard at school and keep picking yourself after you fail, and eventually you'll earn the fruit of your diligent labor. There are no shortcuts to hard work - but it'll all be worth it at the end."

The lottery instead tells people, "Don't like how much money you make? Chip in $2 for the quick-fix opportunity of instant deliverance! No hard work required - just less than you would pay for a tall coffee at Starbucks!" And you can understand why low-income individuals become vulnerable to getting pulled into the not-so-far step of Ponzi schemes and other get-rich-quick fraudulent gimmicks. And how far from that place is actually committing more violent crimes in the name of getting rich without actually honestly working for it?

And this doesn't even take into the consideration of the message that money somehow buys happiness. Do they ever show commercials with lottery winners who are isolated and depressed because they can't distinguish real friends from those who are trying to exploit them? Or with lottery winners who find themselves helplessly in debt because of bad investments and over-consumption?

Yes, I'm sure for the vast majority of people it's a harmless game and very few people play the lottery one week and then jump to the logical conclusion that their better bet for getting cash quick is holding up a liquor store. I'm just uneasy with some of the undertones when you scratch below the surface with a coin.