By Simon Gonzalez
The odds are never in your favor
The drawing for the record $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot was held last night. Sorry you didn’t win.
It is possible that someone in Wrightsville Beach, or Wilmington, or New Hanover County, or the Cape Fear region did win. But chances are, the condolences will hold up. The odds are heavily in my favor that no correction or retraction will be necessary. Very heavily. As in, 292.2 million to one.
According to the Multi-State Lottery Association, those were the chances of winning the grand prize.  Let that sink in for a moment. One in 292.2 million. There’s a better chance of being hit by lightning this year (one in 700,000), or being bitten by a shark (one in 11.5 million). As someone said, there’s a slightly better chance of hitting the jackpot than of having your name randomly pulled from a hat filled with the names of everyone in the country.
On some level people know this. Perhaps they can’t quote the exact odds, but they realize they’re not going to win. Yet they play anyway. And play. And play. There were 440 million tickets sold for last week’s Powerball drawing, when the jackpot was a mere $900 million or so. There’s likely to be even more this time around.
The North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries reports that Americans spent more than $70 billion on the lottery in 2014, the most recent year for which numbers are available. That’s more than they spent on sporting events, movies, books, video games and music. Combined.
Why do people play? Some see it as just a bit of harmless fun. I had a friend who loved to buy scratch-off tickets for, he said, the thrill of seeing if he’d won anything. Buying a lottery ticket can contribute to a sense of community, providing something to talk about around the coffee pot at work.
Some see it as evidence of the optimist within us. We’re “in love with hope,” according to one human behavior expert. It only costs a couple of bucks for a chance — no matter how slim — to hit the jackpot. You can’t win if you don’t play, we’re told repeatedly. Might as well go for it!
There’s also the charitable aspect. In our state it’s called the North Carolina Education Lottery. Proceeds go to teaching our kids. Nothing wrong with contributing to that, right?
It might be harmless fun for some. And yes, some of the proceeds do go to education. (For the record, only 38 cents of every dollar spent on Powerball tickets and 26 cents per dollar for all games combined make it into the state coffers.)
But there is a darker side to the lottery.
The human behavior expert might be right in that we’re in love with hope, but it’s false hope built on a faulty premise. Money cannot buy happiness, or contentment.
Studies have shown that major jackpot winners are no happier than the rest of us. In fact, many of them actually become more miserable after their windfall.
“No researcher has ever found that people are happier in the first year after winning the lottery,” a researcher told The New York Times in 2014.
The false hope also contributes to what is essentially a tax on poor people. Research shows that low-income communities spend considerably more of their money on lotteries than high-income communities.
A Duke University study in the 1980s revealed that the poorest third of households buy half of all lotto tickets. A report from the North Carolina Justice Center said that 18 of the 20 counties with poverty rates higher than 20 percent had lottery sales topping the statewide average.
In other words, too many tickets are being bought by those who can least afford them. No wonder lotteries are called regressive taxes, a way of funding the state that disproportionately takes money from the poor.
Then there are those who play from compulsion, who have gambling addictions. The state acknowledges them by setting aside $1 million a year for a Problem Gambling Helpline, with counselors available 24 hours a day.
One of the iconic lottery scenes in popular culture took place in the movie “The Hunger Games.” Before Effie reaches into the bowl to choose the names of the lucky winners who will have to fight for their lives, she quotes one of the most memorable lines from “Hunger Games” author, Suzanne Collins’ book of the same title: “May the odds be ever in your favor.”
It might be fun to quote that when buying a Powerball ticket, but when it comes to playing the lottery, one thing is clear: The odds are never in your favor.
