The American Dream is a lottery ticket (and the odds keep getting worse)
Overnight, the cost of a Mega Millions lottery ticket doubled. Starting today, a single ticket costs $2, a 100% jump in price. But there’s a silver lining: the odds of winning are now even worse than before.
Wait, what? Yes, that’s correct.The price of admission just doubled — and the odds of winning the jackpot have gone from never to impossible.
In any normal industry, that would be a recipe for disaster. But gambling is not a normal industry. In fact, Mega Millions and its bigger rival, Powerball, have thrived over the years by steadily making the odds worse and worse so that nobody wins and the jackpots keep getting bigger.
The evolution of the lottery parallels the growth of a winner-take-all mindset in this country. The American Dream, which once promised a chicken in every pot, has become a golden goose for one lucky winner. Eventually.
When the first Powerball drawing took place 25 years ago, the odds of winning the jackpot were 1 in 55,000,000. Let’s be honest, those are incredibly bad odds (by comparison, your chance of dying from chronic constipation are 1 in two million). But in a perverse, only-in-America twist, the good people at Powerball kept tweaking the formula to make a long shot into a pipe dream.
How did they do it? Simple. In the beginning you had to match 5 out of 45 numbers to win. Today it’s 5 out of 69. Doesn’t sound like a big change but it’s made the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot 1 in 292,000,000. The odds of winning Mega Millions are now 1 in 303,000,000— about the same chance you have of becoming president, but not as good as your chance of being killed by an asteroid.
“The American Dream, which once promised a chicken in every pot, has become a golden goose for one lucky winner and a goose egg for everybody else.”
More importantly, why did they do it? Why mess with success? Why not make the odds of winning better?
The Canadian national lottery, known as Lotto 6/49, has the same odds of winning today as when it started in 1982 (about 1:14,000,000). Match 6 out of 49 numbers (hence the name) and you win a jackpot that starts at $5 million. Sure, the jackpots aren’t as big as Powerball — mostly because Canada has a smaller population and people actually win the lottery so it doesn’t keep rolling up into jackpots that are bigger than the GDP of many small nations.
Trust the Canadians to create a lottery where nothing ever happens. Lotto 6/49 lacks Las Vegas dazzle dazzle, but it’s also not pie-in-the-sky unicorn like Powerball or Megamillions. Your chances of winning some prize in the Lotto 6/49 are 1:6.6 (compared to 1:25 in Powerball) and there are lots of ways to win smaller prizes. Hey, it’s almost like socialism! It says a lot about the American character that people here would rather chase the chimera of joining the ultramegarich — but never will — than settle for some shitty prize of only $5 million.
Is it just a coincidence that our president is a failed casino developer — and two of his biggest supporters are oily casino moguls? Is it surprising that a billionaire blowhard is a hero to millions of poor rubes who make up the bulk of lottery ticket buyers — and gamblers.
This national tendency toward magical thinking also helps explain why that other great casino — the stock market — has been rocketing ahead since Trump was elected. The new administration has not actually achieved much to date, but the mere whiff of lower taxes and deregulation has Wall Street snapping up stock certificates (or are they Irish Sweepstake tickets?) at a record pace.
Poor people vote for a billionaire who has no record of ever doing anything for anyone other than himself and his cronies. Poor people buy lottery tickets when they know the odds of winning are virtually nil. Rich people invest in a future where nobody pays taxes and our national debt need never be repaid.
The same delusion underlies all three. But every get-rich-quick scheme in America is a scheme.
When I was a boy in the 20th century, my father would carefully lay out his Irish Sweepstake tickets on the counter as if they were paper money or savings bonds. Their verisimilitude with currency and stock certificates was no doubt intentional. They looked like winners, even though the odds of winning a big prize was actually about 1 in 390,000.
If you’ve never heard of the Irish Sweepstake, that’s because it’s long since disappeared. Once governments got into the lottery business in the late 1960s, the Irish Sweepstake went the way of an honest day’s work (there have been revelations that the Sweepstake itself may have not been very honest.)
My father and millions of other dreamers around the world threw down $5 each for those tickets and a chance to win $500,000 (about $5 million today).
When you look at the odds, the Irish Sweepstake was “if you work really hard, you might be wealthy one day” compared to today’s version which is “the game is rigged and the casino is run by billionaires — but keep dreaming!”
