Why do we take our chances? Credit: Viktor DrachevTASS via Getty Images
In the 1990s, Uncle Eugene, the most entrepreneurial member of the Romanian branch of my extended family, borrowed £4,000 from his sister in Glasgow to buy fruit machines for his bar in Arad. During the Ceausescu years, the pleasures of pressing nudge and holding two bananas were unknown. Capitalism altered that. But it also produced brisk and unpredictable legal changes. A couple of days after installing a row of one-armed bandits on his premises, Eugene discovered that a new bylaw prevented him from switching them on.
The loss caused friction among his relations, but at least it fitted the family history. In 1947, Eugene’s dad had won big on the lottery. However, in August of that month, the Romanian government, with no prior announcement, replaced the currency. 20,000 old lei were suddenly worth a single new leu. A low limit was imposed on the amount it was possible to exchange. The name of this policy was the Great Stabilisation. It made Eugene’s dad the owner of an enormous pile of worthless banknotes.
Luck attends our sense of most events of consequence. The stories of whole families might be told through it. Only matters of complete indifference seem untouched. And yet, it’s very easy to argue it out of existence. Luck might best be seen as a fiction we inhabit because we don’t like the idea that many events in the universe are random. We’re attached to the idea of our own agency and merit. We also love patterns — an instinct of immense evolutionary value that leads us to see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast or believe that if a roulette ball has landed on red ten times in a row, it’s more likely to hit black on the eleventh.
This is the ground of What are the Chances, a new book by the psychology and neuroscience professor Barbara Blatchley. One of Blatchley’s most persuasive arguments is that we are pretty loose and inconsistent with the language we use when we evoke the idea of luck. We confuse fate (which implies a universe in which invisible forces have determined everything in advance) with destiny (a concept with more room for human agency) and chance (which is beyond the control of gods or humans). But in our daily lives, none of this seems to matter much, because such thinking is usually the means to an end: “We look for the cause behind even the most mundane of events,” writes Blatchley, “because feeling as though we know why something happened helps us feel in control of that thing and, by extension, of the universe itself.”
To see this in action, watch a quiz show. On an edition of Pointless a couple of weeks ago, a financial consultant called Helen knocked herself out of the quiz by declaring that Kat Slater in EastEnders was played by an actor called Jessie Williams. The totemic scoreboard gave its dreaded red negative twitch. “Very, very unlucky,” sighed Richard Osman, as he revealed that the correct answer was in fact Jessie Wallace.
But unless she had fallen under the influence of some invisible force that erases soap facts from the heads of random victims, Helen had not been unlucky. She had simply been wrong. Her knowledge of Queen Vic landladies was inadequate to the demands of the game. Should Osman have put it in these terms? Absolutely not. It would have been fatal to the pleasures of his own show. A game of skill that has no language of luck is no game at all.
It’s also harder to win. The former cricketer Ed Smith, who wrote Luck: What It Means and Why It Matters (2012), was once part of a team that decided it would abolish such consoling words and stop ascribing human fault to the imagined influence of cosmic forces. It took six weeks at the bottom of the results table to reverse the policy. Sometimes magical thinking gets magical results.
But what about games with higher stakes than Pointless, or Kent vs Middlesex? An attractively round 50 years ago, the philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice (1971), one of the few works of political philosophy to be adapted as a stage musical. The lottery was an important metaphor for Rawls. For him, life issued us with two tickets at birth. One for the natural lottery, in which the prize is a biological potential inherited from our parents. One for the social lottery, in which winners emerge from the womb into highly favourable material, social and political circumstances. Like all true examples of luck, these advantages have no dimension of desert or merit. Luck is unearned.
We can all think of figures in public life — dynastic columnists, aristocratic models, the progeny of 60s rock stars who clutter up ES Magazine — who owe at least part of their success to early receipt of a Rawlsian Thunderball. And in experimental situations, as in life, recipients of this good fortune do not always perceive their privilege. A famous study at Stanford University set up games of Monopoly in which one player took a double salary and rolled with two dice instead of one: winners failed to acknowledge their unfair advantage and reported that they had triumphed through merit.
I don’t much like Monopoly, but I do play the National Lottery. Since Covid came, I’ve bought tickets more frequently. I always let the app choose the numbers, because the pure aleatory nature of the process seems both the point and the pleasure. I’d never dream of gambling in anything where knowledge, skill or judgement plays a part. (If, like Sid James and Hattie Jacques in Carry On at Your Convenience, I owned an occult budgie that tweeted on hearing the winner of the 2.30 at Newmarket, I’d consider the bet a fraud on the bookie.)
The National Lottery is sometimes called a tax on stupidity — mainly by people who regard themselves as clever, many of whom wrongly attribute the thought to Voltaire. The seventeenth-century economist William Petty is a better source. In his 1662 Treatise of Taxes and Contributions he wrote that “a Lottery … is properly a Tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools.” (Thank you, QI elves.) But there are more accurate and less snobbish ways of describing its community of players.
A 2009 study by the ecumenical Christian think-tank Theos found that employed professionals spent around £40 a year on the lottery, £30 a year less than manual workers. Benefit claimants were the most prodigious buyers of scratch cards, and the lowest earners — those on £15k–20k per year — were laying out almost a week’s earnings on tickets for the main draw. Theos hasn’t updated these findings, but suspects, as scratch card sales have climbed and draw tickets fallen, that the Lottery now “leans ever more on sales to lower income players”. Camelot has produced no data to contradict this.
If the lottery is a tax, it is a tax on poverty. Those who pay it do not do so because they lack knowledge or are guilty of some kind of cognitive error. A person spending £1.50 of their £86 Universal Credit on a ticket knows what proportion of their income this represents. That money, however, purchases something powerful. Participation in a game that makes Rawls’s lotteries irrelevant. If, to choose a not particularly random example, David Cameron buys a ticket for the Set for Life draw, he is no more likely to win than anyone else.
The machine that reduces an ordered stack of National Lottery balls to a random field of tumbling atoms is called Excalibur. This is one of Barbara Blatchley’s conceptual confusions. Excalibur, as any viewer Monty Python and the Holy Grail will know, is a sword of fate or destiny, not chance. The film’s group of soil-eating anarcho-syndicalists would see the contradiction. When one (played by Michael Palin) tells Graham Chapman’s King Arthur that “strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,” he is objecting to two things: a society in which outcomes are predetermined by supernatural forces, and one in which wealth and power are largely inherited. There would be less inequality in a world where mud-eaters were as likely to receive a magical sword as a royal figure who has an ancestral supply of ham and jam and Spam. (You might remember that this conversation ends with Graham Chapman attempting to beat Michael Palin to the ground.)
Most attempts to reduce economic inequality accept the results of Rawls’s social lottery and then try to ameliorate their effects. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever suggested working towards the same end by harnessing the power of chance. A massive increase in inheritance tax, for instance, which could be funnelled into the National Lottery, distributing unearned wealth randomly through the population. Having lost — again — on my most recent ticket, I’d be happy to consider it. We could call it the Great Stabilisation.
Matthew Sweet is a broadcaster and writer. His books include Inventing the Victorians and Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers and Themselves.
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SubscribeThanks for this – regarding Luck and Life, I can recommend Richard Wiseman’s “The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind”. A person who perceives themselves as ‘Lucky’ is more likely to take advantage of opportunities than those who do not. This can explain why they were more successful, or perhaps felt they were. Professor Wiseman is a well-known skeptic and paranormal investigator and avoids many of the “pop-psychology” pitfalls: he eliminated the supernatural hypothesis by buying each subject a lottery ticket. There was, of course, no pattern in the wins and losses that corresponded to how lucky the participants felt!
But in the event of a Great Stabilisation where all became equal beneficiaries of the Rawlsian social lottery a new rich and elite would soon disturb the Stabilisation as their natural lottery would have unfettered expression. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss – as the Who sung.
Consider “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut… in this story where all are made equal, by handicapping where necessary, eventually those blessed by the natural lottery break free.
It has always seemed to me that buying a lottery ticket confers upon you a ‘right to dream’…though the chances of a big win are infinitesimal, it is better than the zero chance you had before. As a lifelong dreamer, I think this is a very powerful force and in some sense a force for good that, far from exploiting the poor, gives them equality in a ‘what if’ world.
Luck is neither “earned” nor “unearned”; it is a form of property, as innately associated with the individual as his or her body. Therefore, to tax, reduce or appropriate it in any way is to launch an assault upon their most fundamental right. How typically left wing.
That is a truly bizarre argument. You should not tax property, is that the argument?
The merits of private property are not absolute but depend on social and economic outcomes. There isn’t any great moral merit to the fact for example that the ancestors of land owners were often given the land by the King, and his ancestors conquered it by force.
The level and structure of taxation is also a pragmatic issue to be debated in society, not a form of ‘theft’ as so many libertarians argue. There is and will never be a purely libertarian society by the way.
Great article.
Can’t prove it, but for me Luck , Destiny & maybe Fate are supernaturally real. Maybe the reason why this isnt’ accepted by mainstream science is that Lady Luck is bashful, so doesn’t show up to play in Empirical tests. Or maybe they sometimes do, but militant materialists fake the results when its not to their liking, which is alleged to have been the case with some of CSICOP’s work. That said, the vast majority of what the sceptics label as “magical thinking” / quackery probably does deserve those labels, with misunderstood chance accounting for most of the otherwise unexplained patterns we think we identify.
I’m not so sure about destiny and fate, I don’t believe things are predetermined, however blind luck plays a very important part in almost all our lives. Being born into a wealthy family with contacts to set you up in the world of work is exceedingly lucky, not that you’ll ever hear people in this situation admit it as they all believe their success is down solely to their own actions rather than the leg ups they’ve received.
Likewise I’ve seen people stay in jobs and get nowhere, whilst others have left and moved up exceedingly quickly. I’ve also seen the opposite happen in both scenarios, with those involved having no way of knowing how their decisions would have panned out before they made them. Luck is one of the most important aspects of our lives, we just admit it because most of us don’t like to think that that much of our lives is completely out of our control
Well do you feel lucky punk? Well Mr Dirty Harry since I’m cowering on the ground with your Magnum pistol pointed at my head..err no.
The USA State of Georgia created the lottery for Social Justice. Every resident of Georgia with a ‘B’ average in high school would get free college or University in the State from the profit.
That almost all the revenue of the lottery is from the low income who’s children tend to not graduate university, and it is paying for all the Middle Class children who universally go to college – University. This was not brought up much. And when it is no one cares.
This is the most twisted regressive tax of all regressive taxes…. I hate the Lottery, and would outlaw it if I could. It is a degenerate way of raising money for a government – who have NO Business in providing gambling. That is NOT a remit of government in any sane definition of what government is supposed to do.
It gives those at the bottom a chance to escape the monotony and drudgery of their lives, and the way the system is stacked against those with nothing for most it’s their only chance of escape, no matter how vanishingly small it is. You can argue that using lottery funds to pay for university is a bad use of the money and I’d tend to agree with you, but to outlaw something that gives people a bit of hope and licence to dream a little seems unnecessarily cruel