lots of games to play

I don’t think recent revelations that a scratchcard had to be withdrawn because the punters couldn’t understand negative numbers says much about the general level of education in Britain. Under any system you can require people to go to school, but you can only offer them knowledge, and the kind of people the lottery appeals to most are the ones most likely to reject that offering.

That’s not because only stupid people play the lottery. It’s partly a means of monetizing pretty general fantasies about suddenly having lots of money. But given the odds, only stupid people believe that they will actually win it.

Given that belief in actually winning is what drives people to spend lots of money – comparatively speaking – on the lottery, it follows that as a profit maximizing institution, the lottery’s core constituents are going to be stupid people and that the aim of the lottery is going to be to get them to hand over as much money as possible. And the way you do that is to give stupid people lots of opportunities to believe that they will win lots of money. In other words, you give them lots of games to play.

This is where the lottery hits a problem: there is a limit to stupidity. In particular, there is a limit to the number of times you can rearrange a sequence of numbers into a simple game of chance without letting some iota of intelligence creep in. And when you do this you end up making demands on the punters, some of which they will inevitably be unable to meet.

So unless you think it’s the job of education to train stupid people to know just enough to make stupid bets, then the fault isn’t really with the education system. The scandal here is that the state promotes the exploitation of stupidity by licensing a lottery system in the first place.

Comments

[dsquared]

I think it is pretty much definitive of being middle class that you are middle class if your inability to spell, write a grammatical sentence and/or do simple arithmetic is regarding as charmingly eccentric rather than a serious problem requiring state intervention. If I chucked this stapler I have in my hand, I bet I could bounce it off two or three people who would be foxed by those scratchcards before it hit the ground.

[ejh]

If you can actually perform that feat I reckon you ought to be on telly...

[Chris Williams]

Perhaps dsquared's colleagues are _so_ nice but dim that he'll be able to persuade them to stand very close to one another, with their heads touching. Given that, it would be pretty straightforward - especially at close range.

[Matthew]

I liked most not that she didn't understand it, but that she was so adamant that they were trying to con her.

It's not always that simple though, I write a report in which we used to say something along the lines of 'it fell to a negative $11bn from a negative $9bn' and people used to email and say you mean 'rose'. Anyway now we say 'it worsened', which isn't briliant but is accurate.

[ejh]

I suspect that arithmetical dexterity, like language learning, or tactical vision in chess, is somehting that is very much best mastered at an early age: leave it too late and even if you remember the procedure it will always be a procedure, step-by-step with you rechecking at the end.

[jamie]

Confession: I know which is a lower or higher negative number, cos it's like reversed, innit, but I'd have a lot of trouble trying to calculate in them.

As regards arithmetical ecucation here in Manchester, what sticks in my mind from my stepson's time at a normal state primary school was him learning how to calculate the volume of irregular cuboids shortly before leaving.

[ajay]

I write a report in which we used to say something along the lines of 'it fell to a negative $11bn from a negative $9bn' and people used to email and say you mean 'rose'.

If cash flow went from minus $9bn to minus $11bn, I would say it had risen. Intuitively, it makes sense: "Our cash flow was negative $9 billion last year, but it's fallen since then" - would you expect negative $7bn, or negative $11bn?

Best to avoid using it at all. Or use "worsen" which makes it unambiguous.