Lottery
Categories: Financial Theory
Great short story by Shirley Jackson.
It's also a vehicle through which states raise a lot of dough for their schools and other public-service projects, usually taking advantage of people who can't do the math as to how bad a deal that hard-earned $20 worth of lottery tickets was for them.
Structurally, a lottery just has one or a series of winning "tickets." A draw happens. If the winning ticket's number matches your number, you win. Duh.
The problem with the big lotteries? Something like a billion tickets sell for, say, 5 bucks each, producing 5 billion dollars for the state. The lottery then pays out a small percentage of that total, guaranteeing bad odds, a bad deal, general badness for the buyers of those tickets, who often think they're buying hopes and dreams and a better future...when, in fact, they're just donating more money to the people manipulating them.