Lotto: Everybody loses

A good way to sell stuff is to transform the reasons people don't want to buy into reasons why they should. Luxury watches are an expensive self-indulgence, and none of us want to feel selfish. So Patek Philippe reassures us that ‘You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation.’ That nugget of egotistical decadence? It actually makes you noble, a good parent, a guardian of heritage. And definitely not selfish.

The British Lottery is now pulling the same trick with their new campaign and its sneaky, squalid question: ‘Who wins if you win?’ Their adverts show happy, healthy, mostly younger people holding pieces of paper that say like ‘my kids’ or ‘my best friend’. I thought that buying a lottery ticket was foolish. But apparently it’s an investment, it’s altruistic, it’s about winning. Hurrah!

Unfortunately their slogan is hogwash. For starters, you’re very, very unlikely to win. That’s partly because millions of other people are buying tickets too. But it’s also because only half the revenue from UK lottery tickets is paid out as winnings, making the average return on investment -50%.

So who’s making this useless investment? Well, not the comfortable, sun-kissed people from the adverts. Lottery tickets are mostly bought by those who have less money and have been educated to a lower level, people who feel so disadvantaged that they’re prepared to make any investment in the hope of a better life. The Lottery is sometimes called a tax on stupidity. It’s not. It’s a tax on desperation, and poorer people are more desperate.

Frustratingly, the lottery actually seems to perpetuate their condition. Only around a quarter of Lottery revenue goes to charitable work. Ideally, it would reinvest that revenue back into poorer, lottery-ticket-buying communities. But according to a 2009 report by Theos, it doesn’t. (The Lottery’s ludicrously uninformative website gives no data either way — a bad sign). And wherever its money is spent, 60% of it goes on sports, arts and heritage, generally the preoccupations of better educated, wealthier people. Whether you win or not, needier areas probably won’t.

There’s another, subtler cost to the Lottery: the damage it does to our perceptions of wealth. For one, it says that wealth inequality’s okay, that it’s good to collect crazy amounts of money from the majority of people and give it to a randomly-selected few. Most people lose cash, and a few get more than they know what to do with. That’s the opposite of what the state should model to its citizens.

Remind me what's attractive about this?

The Lottery also promotes the idea that you need vast amounts of money to be happy. But for most people a decent income is enough. An article by Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman showed that once people earn $75000 a year, further increases in income don’t much increase their day-to-day happiness or decrease their unhappiness and stress. The reason more people don’t earn $75000 is that some people earn so, so much more than that. If there was less income (and wealth) inequality then people would be happier. The economy would be stronger too: wealthy people spend their money on less economically beneficial stuff. So greater equality sounds great to me. Unfortunately, the Lottery encourages the opposite.

The Lottery isn’t about altruism, it’s about inequality. It’s not about happiness, it’s about discontentment. And it’s not about winning, it’s about losing — especially if you’re poor. But its ingenious little line will take all those great reasons not to buy and twist them 180 degrees.