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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 essent

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 fixing that with education, we could fix it by making the probability closer to people's intuition. Given the well-known issues with means testing, randomly assigning the payouts instead might be a significant improvement.

hetspookjee 4y ago
I am very skeptic of this theory as a lot winners of lottery’s end up in enormous debt after few years due to horrible mismanagement of their funds. Why take this odd route and not just directly implement UBI if that is the goal?
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  That's a serious issue, but I think it's mostly caused by the long-term impact of poverty both socially and neurologically. If you grow up worrying about money you often learn instincts that screw you over if you luck out. My uninformed guess underlying this is that making the payouts smaller and more frequent would solve this. First off, people would grow up in better communities. Second, I think if the payout wasn't advertised as "retire for life and be a rich person" people would face less social pressure to shower friends and family in gifts. I think given no constraints giving everyone $1,000/month is best, but I think there's a fair argument giving 1/1000 people $1000/month (and alternating) is better than giving everyone $100/month.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  The "where are they now" stories have been getting more positive over the years. It seems like more of the winners are middle to upper middle class and also awareness of the curse of past lottery winners has made winners more aware that they need a plan so they don't end up penniless a few years down the road.
Andaith 4y ago
I really like this idea(not for UBI, but for a better lottery that more evenly distributes winnings), couple it with X amount of free tickets per week/month for low income earners too!
ISL 4y ago
If playing the lottery becomes worthwhile, arbitrageurs will immediately step in until it isn't. 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.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  I disagree on minimal evidence. My intuition is it's more likely you're wrong about what people value than that many people are wrong about that kind of math. Arbitrage is a real issue, but it's not magic and there's a lot of friction in the real world. For ex, you don't get spam callers trying to buy your chance of a large settlement payout.
- forgotloginonp4 4y ago
  The claims of “bad at math” ring hollow as Selbee did appear to use statistical analysis and there is a movie being made celebrating those wins. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner... But it’s also possible that math whizzes like Jerry Selbee are finding and exploiting flaws that lottery officials haven’t noticed yet. In 2011, Harper’s wrote about “The Luckiest Woman on Earth,” Joan Ginther, who has won multimillion-dollar jackpots in the Texas lottery four times. Her professional background as a PhD statistician raised suspicions that Ginther had discovered an anomaly in Texas’ system. In a similar vein, a Stanford- and MIT-trained statistician named Mohan Srivastava proved in 2003 that he could predict patterns in certain kinds of scratch-off tickets in Canada, guessing the correct numbers around 90 percent of the time. Srivastava alerted authorities as soon as he found the flaw. If he could have exploited it, he later explained to a reporter at Wired, he would have, but he had calculated that it wasn’t worth his time. It would take too many hours to buy the tickets in bulk, count the winners, redeem them for prizes, file the tax forms. He already had a full-time job.
- Tozen 4y ago
  You seem to be also missing the point of these lottery retailers being disproportionately clustered in the poor Black neighborhoods. The "math problem" also involves pushing the distribution of the "vice" off on them (where such people are more desperate to escape their circumstances), then negating any overall or possible benefit to those poor Blacks that don't have such a vice (like kids) and need greater educational funding and opportunities.
chernevik 4y ago
And once word of that gets out, just what exactly do you think happens then?
codelord 4y ago
Yes. Let's make a lottery based economy. That would boost the productivity and make the nation prosperous. This is like fixing a pothole by creating a supermassive black hole.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  Okay, just replace our existing failed welfare system with this then. You don't think there's massive suppressed innovation because so few people can try a startup?
  - Bud 4y ago
    We don't have a "failed welfare system". Welfare works. The only "failure" here is our failure to keep adequately funding it.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      It's failed in the sense that poverty rates stopped declining in 1968, when welfare started.
yunohn 4y ago
How is the lottery like UBI? This is similar to crypto maxis gambling on shitcoins and saying “generational wealth opportunity”. Both of these are the siphoning of money from large volumes of people to a few people, who are the “success stories” used to dupe the next set of people.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  I'm saying it's about the specific values of the parameters. Right now they're set so it's an evil trap. But we could maybe just tweak the parameters so that wasn't the case. If the evil of the lottery is that the expected value is lower than the ticket cost that's just a simple stats problem to fix.
  - ac29 4y ago
    Are you suggesting the lottery should be changed so the expected value is higher than the ticket cost? How would that work?
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      The same way below market rate public housing works: subsidy from tax revenue
      - yunohn 4y ago
        But why not just direct UBI? What is the point of tax subsidised lotteries, to enrich a minuscule % of poor people while all the others buy tickets in hope?
        iudqnolq 4y ago
        As one fair way of allocating insufficient resources. The lottery is evidence a lot of poor people would rather have a chance at radically improving their life than a small amount of money.
ipaddr 4y ago
Changing the lottery into a similiar model compared to Spain where there is one big price pool and thousands of winners winning smaller amounts might go a long way.
blabberwocky 4y ago
I think there is an inherent tension between the two ideas in that a lottery is, fundamentally, one profiting at the expense of (a consenting) many, while UBI guarantees a baseline state for many without particularly disadvantaging any one. Some might consider UBI an implementation of John Rawls' Difference principle [0], that distributive inequalities should work to the advantage of the worst-off. Lotteries would support utilitarians' counterargument that one may very well prefer to roll the dice on his or her welfare, rather than accept a guaranteed, minimally satisfactory baseline. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness#Second_principle:_the_equality_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness#Second_pri...

hetspookjee 4y ago

I am very skeptic of this theory as a lot winners of lottery’s end up in enormous debt after few years due to horrible mismanagement of their funds. Why take this odd route and not just directly implement UBI if that is the goal?

iudqnolq 4y ago
That's a serious issue, but I think it's mostly caused by the long-term impact of poverty both socially and neurologically. If you grow up worrying about money you often learn instincts that screw you over if you luck out. My uninformed guess underlying this is that making the payouts smaller and more frequent would solve this. First off, people would grow up in better communities. Second, I think if the payout wasn't advertised as "retire for life and be a rich person" people would face less social pressure to shower friends and family in gifts. I think given no constraints giving everyone $1,000/month is best, but I think there's a fair argument giving 1/1000 people $1000/month (and alternating) is better than giving everyone $100/month.
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
The "where are they now" stories have been getting more positive over the years. It seems like more of the winners are middle to upper middle class and also awareness of the curse of past lottery winners has made winners more aware that they need a plan so they don't end up penniless a few years down the road.

Andaith 4y ago

I really like this idea(not for UBI, but for a better lottery that more evenly distributes winnings), couple it with X amount of free tickets per week/month for low income earners too!

ISL 4y ago

If playing the lottery becomes worthwhile, arbitrageurs will immediately step in until it isn't. 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.

iudqnolq 4y ago
I disagree on minimal evidence. My intuition is it's more likely you're wrong about what people value than that many people are wrong about that kind of math. Arbitrage is a real issue, but it's not magic and there's a lot of friction in the real world. For ex, you don't get spam callers trying to buy your chance of a large settlement payout.
forgotloginonp4 4y ago
The claims of “bad at math” ring hollow as Selbee did appear to use statistical analysis and there is a movie being made celebrating those wins. https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner... But it’s also possible that math whizzes like Jerry Selbee are finding and exploiting flaws that lottery officials haven’t noticed yet. In 2011, Harper’s wrote about “The Luckiest Woman on Earth,” Joan Ginther, who has won multimillion-dollar jackpots in the Texas lottery four times. Her professional background as a PhD statistician raised suspicions that Ginther had discovered an anomaly in Texas’ system. In a similar vein, a Stanford- and MIT-trained statistician named Mohan Srivastava proved in 2003 that he could predict patterns in certain kinds of scratch-off tickets in Canada, guessing the correct numbers around 90 percent of the time. Srivastava alerted authorities as soon as he found the flaw. If he could have exploited it, he later explained to a reporter at Wired, he would have, but he had calculated that it wasn’t worth his time. It would take too many hours to buy the tickets in bulk, count the winners, redeem them for prizes, file the tax forms. He already had a full-time job.
Tozen 4y ago
You seem to be also missing the point of these lottery retailers being disproportionately clustered in the poor Black neighborhoods. The "math problem" also involves pushing the distribution of the "vice" off on them (where such people are more desperate to escape their circumstances), then negating any overall or possible benefit to those poor Blacks that don't have such a vice (like kids) and need greater educational funding and opportunities.

chernevik 4y ago

And once word of that gets out, just what exactly do you think happens then?

codelord 4y ago

Yes. Let's make a lottery based economy. That would boost the productivity and make the nation prosperous. This is like fixing a pothole by creating a supermassive black hole.

iudqnolq 4y ago
Okay, just replace our existing failed welfare system with this then. You don't think there's massive suppressed innovation because so few people can try a startup?
- Bud 4y ago
  We don't have a "failed welfare system". Welfare works. The only "failure" here is our failure to keep adequately funding it.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    It's failed in the sense that poverty rates stopped declining in 1968, when welfare started.

yunohn 4y ago

How is the lottery like UBI? This is similar to crypto maxis gambling on shitcoins and saying “generational wealth opportunity”. Both of these are the siphoning of money from large volumes of people to a few people, who are the “success stories” used to dupe the next set of people.

iudqnolq 4y ago
I'm saying it's about the specific values of the parameters. Right now they're set so it's an evil trap. But we could maybe just tweak the parameters so that wasn't the case. If the evil of the lottery is that the expected value is lower than the ticket cost that's just a simple stats problem to fix.
- ac29 4y ago
  Are you suggesting the lottery should be changed so the expected value is higher than the ticket cost? How would that work?
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    The same way below market rate public housing works: subsidy from tax revenue
    - yunohn 4y ago
      But why not just direct UBI? What is the point of tax subsidised lotteries, to enrich a minuscule % of poor people while all the others buy tickets in hope?
      - iudqnolq 4y ago
        As one fair way of allocating insufficient resources. The lottery is evidence a lot of poor people would rather have a chance at radically improving their life than a small amount of money.

ipaddr 4y ago

Changing the lottery into a similiar model compared to Spain where there is one big price pool and thousands of winners winning smaller amounts might go a long way.

blabberwocky 4y ago

I think there is an inherent tension between the two ideas in that a lottery is, fundamentally, one profiting at the expense of (a consenting) many, while UBI guarantees a baseline state for many without particularly disadvantaging any one. Some might consider UBI an implementation of John Rawls' Difference principle [0], that distributive inequalities should work to the advantage of the worst-off. Lotteries would support utilitarians' counterargument that one may very well prefer to roll the dice on his or her welfare, rather than accept a guaranteed, minimally satisfactory baseline. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness#Second_principle:_the_equality_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_as_Fairness#Second_pri...