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“Morons Funding the Fight Against Morons” is IMHO a widely-applicable paradigm. For example, I’ve always thought that we could “wind down” the existence of lot

• Tomte 6y ago
  There is a well-established form of counter-protest at Neonazi marches in Germany: Citizens and companies pledge a certain amount of money to antiracist organizations for every person-meter the Nazis are marching. Counter-protestors are then cheering the Nazis on and hold banners thanking them for their anti-racist activism.
  • _Microft 6y ago
    If someone is curious and knows their way around a translation tool, here is the German Wikipedia entry for what Tomte refers to: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechts_gegen_Rechts https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechts_gegen_Rechts Here is a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysTqSHoTz0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysTqSHoTz0M
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• LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  If you think that people who buy lotteries are morons, maybe it’s you who needs some economics education.
  • derefr 6y ago
    Just because nothing else in someone’s life has that high an Expected Value, doesn’t mean lotteries as they exist aren’t negative-sum games for their players (i.e. the system wins and the players as a group lose.) Just like private casinos. (People incorrectly see lotteries as different from casinos — they think casinos are high-margin while lotteries are effectively zero-margin.) There are zero-margin lotteries, but we don’t call them lotteries; we call them in-turn crowdfunding. (IIRC there’s a traditional system of charity somewhere in the world built around having groups that pool funds and then donate the pool each month to one member.)
    • beaconstudios 6y ago
      people buy lottery tickets for many reasons; positive EV is not one of them. Saying people who play the lottery are morons because their activity doesn't fit your definition of smart just makes you ignorant, not them stupid.
      • derefr 6y ago
        > people buy lottery tickets for many reasons; positive EV is not one of them I’m sorry, but you likely haven’t talked to many people who buy lottery tickets. I’ve worked in debt relief — I’ve talked to a lot of such people. A majority truly do expect to win small amounts (e.g. ~$1000) over time that offset their losses. This expectation is subconscious, built mostly from saliency bias: the infrequent wins loom larger in their memory than the frequent losses, so they don’t actually feel like they’re losing money over time. When you sit them down and “budget” for playing the lottery — help them add up how much they’ll spend and how much they’ll gain over a year — they usually quit playing. They’ve usually just literally never done that. Yes, economists prattle on about how playing the lottery can be a rational decision, giving people hope, dopamine hits, etc. But there are lots of available options for non-profitable sources of hope and dopamine hits! Lotteries are a bad choice even among those options. Economists are doing the evo-psych thing here, working backward from what they see to make a prediction of how it could have evolved, rather than actually doing the experiment.
• Supermancho 6y ago
  The profiteers are the lottery mechanism manufacturers. The people who make the tickets, the machines, etc. State run lotteries are TERRIBLE across the board and are the natural result of money in politics. Some group gets together enough money, they can push the public to accept a policy that profits the group indefinitely while marginally changing the lives of the public (usually for the worse, with noise and misinformation).
  • derefr 6y ago
    The problem with current approaches is that they’re trying to educate adults, and adults are stubborn and busy and already addicted to whatever they’re addicted to. My hypothetical would make stats (including game-theory) part of the required high-school curriculum, where the lottery commission pays all the public stats teachers a comfortable salary. Teach kids about why lotteries are a bad deal for them before they ever play one.
    • _Microft 6y ago
      Statistics education helps or "How 4,000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino its Worst Week Ever": http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/09/one-winning-move.html http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2015/09/one-winning-mo...
    • abecedarius 6y ago
      A course in X being required doesn't translate into most people retaining a useful level of skill in X, at least not in the US -- there were some eye-opening stats about this in Caplan's The Case Against Education. I think it jibes with the memories most of us have about high school, too. I'm not saying this problem can't be fixed, but it's upstream of funding and curriculum.
      • pjscott 6y ago
        For statistics classes in particular, the overwhelmingly common failure mode is: 1. Students learn how to apply some formulas to specific types of problems. If you ask them to find the population standard deviation of heights from a sample of 10 people, they can plug those numbers into their calculators and come up with the answer. 2. Except for maybe 10% of the class, they never really develop any deeper understanding. It's all surface level, "figure out which kind of problem this is then use the formula" stuff. 3. All this knowledge is forgotten very quickly once the grim specter of exams is gone. 4. Congratulations! "Education" has happened! The situation is less grim if e.g. you're teaching college students majoring in math or engineering, but would be worse if you tried pushing stats classes on a less selected group like the general high schooler population.
• tobinfricke 6y ago
  > For example, I’ve always thought that we could “wind down” the existence of lotteries not by banning them altogether (for surely many people would be upset with such a decision) but rather 1. banning private lotteries; and then 2. having a single state-owned lottery commission, that is regulated by a law that forces it to be this type of “for-profit but we donate all profits” corp, with the profits funneled directly into public statistics education I can't tell whether you're being facetious, but this is almost exactly how it works. (Lotteries are state-run, private gambling is banned almost everywhere, profits go to state schools.)
  • tome 6y ago
    > I can't tell whether you're being facetious, but this is almost exactly how it works. (Lotteries are state-run, private gambling is banned almost everywhere, profits go to state schools.) In the US. Perhaps derefr was not talking about the US.
    • derefr 6y ago
      Correct. The US almost has it right already. Though there’s a misalignment in the US system between “funding education” and “numeracy”, because there’s 1. no requirement for the right subjects (statistics, game-theory) to be part of the curriculum that the lottery funds; and 2. there’s no incentive to study either of those subjects as part of getting an education degree, so people don’t, and so schools end up with a dearth of teachers qualified to teach on the subject. (The second thing is a bootstrapping problem — if public schools taught the subject, everyone would learn it, and so everyone would be at least a little qualified to teach it. But as it is now, stats and game-theory are college subjects, so you have to choose to learn them as part of a college degree.) Most other countries are far further from having a MFFAM-like model, though.
      • joshstrange 6y ago
        Also while lottery money might go to schools that just means the state doesn't have to fund the school system as much and can take that money they would have budgeted for the schools and put it elsewhere. In the end it results in a net-neutral for schools in a lot of cases. Money earmarked for specific things really has no bearing if the amount of money earmarked is less than or equal to the funding requirements of the thing it's earmarked for. For example, using 100% made up numbers, let's pretend the school budget is $100M and the lottery brings in $50M. Well that just means we can now take $50M from the school budget and use it for other things and combine $50M from the "state budget" and $50M from the "earmarked lottery revenue" and fund the schools for $100M. Now if the lottery brings in over $100M then the schools could get more but I'm not sure if that's happening anywhere.
• reaperducer 6y ago
  Are there other examples of MFFAM that already exist in the world? Taxes on cigarettes that fund anti-smoking campaigns. Taxes on soft drinks that fund anti-obesity campaigns. There are many others. In general, they called "sin taxes," and the money is very often earmarked to eliminate the source of those taxes.
  • derefr 6y ago
    That’s an overlapping but not identical category, I think. Not everything that is a “sin” (violates social norms) is irrational (stupid); not everything that is irrational violates social norms. Lotteries/gambling happen to be both, and so are a bad example of a purely MFFAM policy. The thrust of the original article is closer, but still not quite there: a lot of people do think that racism is just a lack of education as well, so charging rent to racists is both an MFFAM policy and a “sin tax” as well. Something closer would perhaps be... SomethingAwful’s forum registration policy: “It costs $10 to register; we’ll ban you if you’re acting like an idiot; you can come back as many times as you like, but you’ll need to pay another $10 each time.” That’s an MFFAM policy in the small — the money goes to paying the moderators that ban idiots from the forum in the first place, so each $10 a troll pays makes it even more likely they’ll be banned again. And it’s not a “sin tax” — there’s usually nothing perceived as morally wrong with what the troll is doing/saying. (The type of people saying things that are morally wrong in the community’s eyes — talking about child exploitation, for example — get perma-banned instead, I believe.)
• ISL 6y ago
  The lottery, as a specific case, has an unfortunate loophole. If the lottery funds public education, it allows the general fund from the legislature to allocate less money, with a fairly-clear conscience, to public education. The argument, "Math education is already well-funded by the lottery, and we have $IMPORTANT_CAUSE that desperately requires resources, so we will cut state support for math." is difficult to counter. The net outcome is that lotteries become a state-ordained tax on being less mathematically-literate. I would welcome any suggestion that counters this slippery-slope scenario.
  • V-2 6y ago
    I would add that the solution where "math education is well-funded by the lottery" is inherently self-defeating :)
• njharman 6y ago
  The expected rate of return for movie tickets is lower than lotteries. Yes, lotteries are bad investments. But also yes, many many people play lotteries as entertainment not retirement plan. The people who are addicted, gamblers, or spend more on (any type of) entertainment or luxury good than they can afford have problem. Some psychological, some educational. But those are the problems, not lotteries. If lotteries went away, those people would still have those problems and just manifest them elsewhere.
• throw080700 6y ago
  I believe this exact system is followed by the government of Kerala, India. Private lotteries are banned. Lotteries seem to be a significant source of revenue for the state.