Grey's Journal:
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The lottery is an illustration of the difference between stupidity and ignorance. The ignorant person doesn't know that the lottery is a bad way to spend one's money and thus can be forgiven for buying a ticket. The stupid person, however, knows the odds are wildly against him, but proceeds regardless. I fall into the second category. Whenever life demands of me even the smallest of responsibilities -- as it does this weekend as I fill out graduate school and job applications -- I find my thoughts turning toward a life of idle luxury. If only I had chosen my parents more carefully, I could have been born into a trust fund or inherited a business in the family for generations that I would have sold to the highest bidder. But, as that is not the case, the only way for me to come into a vast fortune without working is the lottery. I look at my half-finished resume on the computer and convince myself that the 15 minutes of work I did warrants a break. I go off to wonder London, read a book, and possibly go into the post office to buy a ticket into the big life. ``I'd like a lottery card please,'' I say to the man behind the counter. But, my friendly American smile quickly disappears as I remember my past unsuccessful purchases from this vendor and it is replaced by thin lips and squinted eyes, ``a winning card this time.'' I almost never play the scratch card games, because their jackpots are often insultingly small. £1,000? £40,000? Bah! Don't waste my time! I have better things to do than win £40,000. The only scratch game I played with some regularity was Win For Life back in the States. The game is a morbid one as winnings are directly proportional to remaining life. Instead of a one lump sum, the winner of Win For Life receives $2,000 every week for as long as their heart circulates blood. For an American male born in 1981, as I was, life expectancy is 70 years. That means if I win now at age 23, I will get $4,888,000 over the course of my life. If I win when I'm 30, the $2000 per will with result in a still respectable $4,160,000 over the remaining 40 years, but when I'm my father's age, 55, with only 15 years left, the weekly paychecks will add up to a less than impressive $1,560,000. When I buy my last calendar on my 69th birthday the sum is a mere $104,000. It will be a sad day when I realize I no longer have enough life to profitably play Win For Life. When compared to other lottery games, Win For Life is by no means a huge sum of money, but I like the security of it, the sure knowledge that no matter how recklessly I spend my money, every Friday there will be a new two thousand dollars waiting for me in the mailbox. Without a lump sum payment, I am prevented from doing something foolish with my winnings like buying an island. It's also nice to know that if I marry a gold digger it's in her best financial interest to keep me alive as long as possible. It's all the benefits of a paycheck without the work. Sadly, the Win For Life equivalent in the UK was discontinued shortly after my arrival. But, perhaps it's for the best, calculating how many weeks of life I have left (2,439) gets a bit depressing. Instead, my preferred game here is EuroMillions. It's a joint lottery held between the nations of the UK, France and Spain, with more scheduled to join in 2005. I like it because the jackpot is huge and it feels like a political action -- a vote with my pounds that I support the European Union. In EuroMillinos you pick five numbers from one to fifty and two numbers from one to nine. If you match all seven, ten to fifty million pounds are yours. I don't pick my numbers though, for one of my rules regarding the lottery is Thou Shall Not Fall Into A Pattern. I can imagine no worse financial tragedy than playing the same numbers every week and forgetting to buy a ticket or going on vacation when the (theoretically) lucky numbers hit. I try not to even think about the patterns I might play, for it would break my heart to discover the winning numbers one week were all prime or fibonacci. I check the box that commands the computer to pick numbers for me when I buy a ticket and in doing so quite possibly save my sanity. I also estimate this gives me a mildly better chance of actually winning and not being forced to share the jackpot. While every sequence of numbers is equally likely to win, people are not equally likely to pick every sequence of numbers. Few people would choose long strings of consecutive numbers, 42, 43, 44, 45, for example -- but these are just as likely to win. A casual perusal of the National Lotto history shows that weeks where some of the numbers are consecutive are less likely to have jackpot winners, so the money rolls over to the next week. Also, many people use birthdays or anniversaries as lucky numbers, meaning that 31 and under are overrepresented. I also thing it's fair to guess that many people have 7 as one of their numbers, but not many people pick 13. Even less intuitive is the idea that the winning numbers last week are just as likely to be the winning numbers this week. Would any sane person buy a lottery ticket every week using the winning numbers from last week? I think not -- but this strategy is as equally useful as any other. When I do the calculations to see how likely it is that the numbers for the next EuroMillions match the numbers from the last, I get a chance of 1 in 76,275,360. Of course, when I flip over the ticket to read the probability of winning the jackpot with any numbers, my chances are the same: 1 in 76,275,360. Even after taking more years of mathematics than I care to admit, it still feels more unlikely that the winning numbers from last week are as good a bet as any for this week. I'd love to have one of the picks on my ticket be last week's numbers as a reminder to me how tricky statistics can be, but alas doing so would break my No Patterns rule. My idiosynchrasy with avioding patterns doesn't just end with picking random numbers. I don't allow myself to by the tickets every week, or every other week or on any discernible timetable. I'll buy tickets everyday for a fortnight then none for two years, as an example. I don't even like to buy the tickets from the same vendors -- I would hate to see in the newspaper that someone else won a huge sum of money from the place I regularly visit. But, sometimes my lottery actions are so random that I worry the randomness is becoming a pattern of sorts. My other rule with regards to the lottery is Thou Shalt Not Buy A Lottery Ticket For Anyone Else Under Any Circumstances. Ever. I love my family and am fond of my friends, but certainly not fond enough to give them an opportunity at unknown riches that could otherwise be mine. Every Christmas my father buys lottery tickets to stuff the families' stockings above the fireplace. I understand that I am playing into the stereotype of an only child by saying this but, I simply could not stand this tradition if I had siblings to contend with. The potential for my little brother to be on easy street while I toiled in the real world would have driven me mad. As it is, I don't mind that if my father buys a winning ticket there is a 66% chance that it will end up in either my mother's or my father's stocking and only a 33% chance that it will be in mine. With no siblings to split the inheritance with, my parents' financial gain is almost directly mine as well. All I must do is make sure that in their dotage they do nothing foolish, like Will it all away to some television evangelist. And now you will have to excuse me, I've spent the better part of the day looking up interesting statistics on the lottery and creating a spreadsheet for my own calculations. I have school applications to fill out and job applications to send -- well, only if tonights numbers don't match mine. |
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Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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