The Lottery: What Are the Odds?

There is nothing that affects logical thinking quite like the lottery. As soon as that ticket is purchased, your full awareness of the absurdity of the odds is lost to a rolling realisation that you might just win this time. The door being opened to spend your life as you please, the ability to travel across the world, the deep breath of financial security. The brakes are raised on the wagon of anticipation as it picks up speed and excitement across each track — until it inevitably slows to an anticlimactic halt. At least that has been my experience. And, judging by the small odds of winning, pretty much everyone else’s too. 

Entering the Powerball in the US gives you a one in 292.2 million chance of taking home the big prize. The Euromillions gives you a similarly unlikely probability of one in 139.8 million. Yet still, with these insurmountable odds stacked against you, the teasing knowledge that these were the same odds facing the eventual winners before they bought the ticket to their dreams creates a strange sense of hope — all it takes is getting lucky once.

The lottery most likely began as a method of raising government funds for upcoming projects, often as an alternative means of collection to taxation. The Great Wall of China was an early example, as large sections were financed by the Han Dynasty’s state lottery in 205 BC. By the fifteenth century, public lotteries akin to our own were common across various towns in the Low Countries, devoted to rebuilding fortifications and aiding the poor. The game of luck landed on English shores under the stewardship of Elizabeth I in 1566 with tickets costing ten shillings. Each entry came with immunity from one petty crime and a chance to claim the grand prize of £5,000. In today’s money, this would be the equivalent of wagering £120 for the slim chance of winning £1.1 million. As the English government planned more projects, more lotteries were drawn up. 

Eventually, they even began to aid the establishment of new settlements. King James I sanctioned one to support the Jamestown colony in 1621, kickstarting the use of lotteries in North America. From roads to churches to the early university buildings of Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard, the lottery had its hand in financing them all. And when the newly recognised United States celebrated victory in its war of independence, it was the lottery that allowed the founding fathers to raise funds without the irony of heavy taxation. 

But is the lottery really anything other than a different form of tax? The game is commonly referred to as a ‘tax’ on two groups of people: the poor and mathematically ignorant. Although a popular sentiment, the latter misses the point of what the lottery does to the people who play it. You can be told countless times in incredible mathematical detail just how unlikely it is to win the lottery, and still the burning desire to relieve the financial burdens in your life can take over. The draw grabs everyone of all incomes and intelligence, but its recurrent effect on the bank account impacts the lower strata of society above all. It is simply a more socially acceptable form of gambling.

It is this same desperate mode of thinking that Vincent van Gogh captured in his 1882 painting The Poor and Money. The artist walked past a scene of “misery and forlorn attempts by these poor souls to be saved” and sought to capture this heartbreaking spirit in watercolour. Like the hopeful rabble depicted by van Gogh, the lottery today remains a ticket of false hope for just about everyone. An excuse to justifiably step into a dream of better fortune, it is the vehicle for a feeling that arrives as quickly as it is crushed when not a single one of your numbers turns up in the winning draw. Unless you do win, that is. 

Image from Wikimedia Commons