Did you win? If you are reading this rather than sipping Mai Tais on a beach in Aruba, we’re guessing you did not capture the $1.6 billion prize in Tuesday’s Mega Millions lottery drawing.
That’s OK. Millions of other people didn’t win, either, donating their money to state governments in exchange for 1-in-303,000,000 odds of winning the big prize. That calls for some context; according to National Geographic, the odds of an American being struck by lightning during his or her lifetime are 1 in 3,000 — or 101,000 times more likely. Need some more context? The odds of flipping a coin and having it come up “heads” (or “tails”) 28 times in a row are better than the chances of winning Mega Millions.
All of which calls to mind a Han Solo quote from “The Empire Strikes Back,” the greatest of all Star Wars movies. After C-3PO says, “Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1,” the swashbuckling smuggler retorts, “Never tell me the odds.”
Which seems to be an appropriate mantra for people who play multistate lotteries such as Mega Millions and Powerball. They would rather not know the odds when they can dream about a billion-dollar jackpot.
Lottery players have plenty of company, with 44 states partaking in the two big national games in addition to offering smaller state-level contests. The Washington Post, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, reports that about $73 billion was spent on lotteries in 2016. With 49 percent of U.S. adults buying a lottery ticket in a given year, that means the average player annually gambles $600.
Lotteries, obviously, are a form of taxation. Nationally, about 64 percent of the revenue goes to pay out prizes and about 32 percent goes to governments, with administrative costs accounting for the rest. The numbers are similar in Washington, and last year 19 percent ($127 million) of revenue was earmarked for education.
Unlike other taxes, however, lotteries are voluntary. And the fact that many people support lotteries while decrying the slightest increase in sales tax or property tax or the hint of a state capital-gains tax says a lot about changing American values. Once, taxes were considered a contribution to the common good, if not a particularly pleasant one. Gambling was considered the purview of seedy speakeasys. As Washington Post columnist George Will has said: “Gambling has swiftly transformed from social disease into social policy. A generation ago, legalized gambling was rare and generally stigmatized.”
Along the way, the notion that we can improve our lot in life by being smart and working hard has been undermined. Evidence now suggests that our fortune is dependent upon a series of pingpong balls; you don’t have to be smart, you have to be lucky.
We’re not sure those changes have been beneficial for American society, but it seems to be what the people desire — and that desire was strong enough to boost this week’s jackpot to an attention-grabbing $1.6 billion. While the winner or winners will be celebrated and inundated with requests from relatives they never knew existed, millions of people have nothing to show for the money they gambled.
That, of course, was their choice. But with the chance of winning the big prize being 0.0000003 percent, it doesn’t seem to have been a wise one.
All of which will be forgotten when the next mega-jackpot comes along. Upon which we offer good luck to everybody who gets drawn in by big dreams of good fortune. May the odds be ever in your favor.
