21–30 of 205 posts
There's a simple answer: Offer a lottery with a high payout rate and flatten jackpots to the extent they don't cause a shift into other worse sorts of gambling. The total amount of money transferred to support government programs makes up less than 0.5% of total government revenue; it's trivially replaceable.
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If it's so wrong - what's your reasoning for why such neighborhoods end up the way they are?
Being raised in what I believe to be one of these communities this feels very true. In Pennsylvania this supposedly supports seniors, but seniors often are the ones gambling. The most frequent shops for selling lottery tickets are also tobacco stores. I find it hard to resist a scratch off from time to time myself. I don’t know what the solution is, I know it gives people hope and excitement. Even if they think it’s…
As long as you aren't doing it to win but instead to enjoy yourself gambling, and you do it with disposable income, this is fine. Don't beat yourself up for enjoying something mathematically suboptimal.
> Even if they think it’s impossible to work themselves out of debt they hope they’ll “win big” one day keeps them going to an extent. It’s really just another version of the “Marshmallow Question”
On the contrary. With the Marshmallow Question, you know you'll be rewarded. In this situation you do not think you will be rewarded. If the Marshmallow Question was "do you want this Marshmallow, or do you want it thrown away", that would be a better example. At least, in the mind of the players
> but to them the math wouldn’t work out.
It's entirely possible the math doesn't work out. A negative EV is significant if we are playing a game where the purpose is to increase my bank balance, but it's entirely possible that for various reasons that doesn't apply IRL.
Do we make all this illegal, put alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, pro sports and weed into that bucket too. All unnecessary and transfer wealth.
On the other hand, yeah, I'm not sure the argument by the state that hey, it's vice, we'll regulate it and hand the profits over to schools (etc.) is an honest one. Often they dip into the fund for unrelated things.
There's an interesting theory that the solution to this is to subsidize the lottery and improve the odds significantly. Take to the extreme and you could essentially implement UBI this way. I also don't think poor people are wrong to think a chance of getting a life-changing amount of money is a worthwhile luxury spend compared to the other available options. They may be wrong about the probability, but instead of fi…
There's an interesting theory that the solution to this is to subsidize the lottery and improve the odds significantly. Take to the extreme and you could essentially implement UBI this way. I also don't think poor people are wrong to think a chance of getting a life-changing amount of money is a worthwhile luxury spend compared to the other available options. They may be wrong about the probability, but instead of fi…
The argument for the state having a monopoly on lotteries is that if there wasn’t a legal lottery illegal lotteries would proliferate. Thus to protect people, the state should run it as it would then be guaranteed to be fair and free of the criminal element (mobsters, etc.). Ideally, the lotto would just take in enough to pay the winners and administrative expenses. However, most states have abused this monopoly and…
I'm "kind of" fine with the state running it. But they should not be advertising on TV.
There's an interesting theory that the solution to this is to subsidize the lottery and improve the odds significantly. Take to the extreme and you could essentially implement UBI this way. I also don't think poor people are wrong to think a chance of getting a life-changing amount of money is a worthwhile luxury spend compared to the other available options. They may be wrong about the probability, but instead of fi…
Got a lottery ticket with a 10% chance of being worth $100? I'll give you and each of your friends $8.50 for them, guaranteed, today.
Lotteries penalize people who are bad at math. It really is that simple.
> the lottery takes in over US$1 billion yearly. By law, half of the money goes to prizes, one-third to education, and the remainder to operating and marketing the lottery
It pours massive amounts of money into Georgia's education system. It's not perfect but it has put hundreds of thousands of students through school. If we must transfer wealth out of needy communities I can thing of worse places to put it than into education.
There's an interesting theory that the solution to this is to subsidize the lottery and improve the odds significantly. Take to the extreme and you could essentially implement UBI this way. I also don't think poor people are wrong to think a chance of getting a life-changing amount of money is a worthwhile luxury spend compared to the other available options. They may be wrong about the probability, but instead of fi…