South Dakota rancher wins $232 million lottery
What is wrong with this story about a struggling rancher from a small town who wins a gigantic lottery? The comparison is made that this is almost straight from a movie script. Is this a good thing, a “success” story? How about this:
- He is over $3,000 in debt and spent $15 on lottery tickets. What if he didn’t win?
- Who did he win the money from? Millions of people like him who spent $15 on lottery tickets that lost.
- How much extra good does he get out of $232 million vs $23 million or $2 million?
- How is he going to manage his new wealth? Who is going to take a cut of it?
I think the huge jackpot system is extremely inefficient. Even this rancher is going to be losing a lot of his wealth to people who are lining up to take advantage of him now. A much better reward for a lottery (if we must have a lottery since people like to gamble) is to give many smaller prizes. However, this is not nearly as newsworthy and sexy as the huge jackpot. Perhaps we could sex up such a lottery with a more useful grand prize. (I would buy a lottery ticket with a grand prize of brunch with the president.) But in the end, I think it comes down to better education. (How about a grand prize of free college?)
Speaking of better education, I’m waiting for the day where I can upload how to fly a helicopter directly to my brain (from the movie Matrix). Or perhaps how to speak a new language, or how to play the piano. These may be extreme examples, but there are more and more tools that help give us new abilities. Classic examples would be cars that help us “run” faster, airplanes that let us “fly”. TurboTax has been helping me do taxes without an accountant for years. Now at my current company Seravia, we’re building tools to help people with law related issues. Going back to our poor rancher, one day he may save a bit of money on high legal fees with the service that we’re building. Stay tuned! (I know I jumped from education to ability, but are they that different? If we always have access to a calculator, what’s the practical difference between being able to multiply by hand vs being able to use the calculator? In fact, it’s less useful to know how to multiply by hand and not know how to use a calculator.)
