When it comes to Reason and Reasonable…
…I’ve always found the second more useful, but the first more interesting.
\(E=MC^2\) might have built the universe, but I more often find a deliberate application for “a stitch in time saves nine.” Abiogenesis created the sheep—I had to look that word up, and I’ll have to look it up again should I ever want to use it in the future — but all I really need to remember about the sheep is that “I can shear him many times, but skin him only once.”
Reasonable is useful, yes, but I can’t combine “a stitch in time…” with “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link” and “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” to make anything new. I can’t build on it.
Reason has a lot more to play with. Sure, I can’t build a universe, but I can build a tower or a sculpture or an extremely-narrow-but-for-what-it’s-worth-objective argument. I can even build more Reason. And all of those are a lot more fun than counting sheep.
Perhaps for that reason, I’ve been guilty of occasionally overestimating the domain of (capital R) Reason. Not often. I like to believe that age has given me at least a bit of perspective on such things. I can separate my induction from my deduction; I know that B≠A if and only if I accept that A≠B; and even in my intellectual phase (we were all young once), I never fell for any form of definitive utilitarianism or scientific moral imperative.
But I fell for this one. I believed in the accuracy and completeness of the objective argument against the lottery. I’m ashamed to say that I even haughtily (worse, publicly) dismissed the lottery as “a tax on the mathematically unsophisticated.”
Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa. Mea Culpa.
The objective argument is simple:
- Chance of winning Lotto Texas (pick 6 of 54 numbers) = 1:26MM
- Factor in chance to split – 1:32MM
- Factor in taxes – 1:36MM
- Factor in cash-out penalty – 1:50MM
Splitting aside, you’d need a Lotto Texas jackpot around $90MM just to cover taxes and penalties. We’ve seen jackpots like that before, but the chance to split increases with the number of players, and the number of players increases with the size of the jackpot. The highest Powerball jackpot ever paid each winner $328MM pre-tax dollars, nowhere near $584MM post-tax dollars needed to cover their odds.
Lottery math requires a fair amount of assumption, because the state doesn’t publish the number of tickets sold. I started with a brief explanation of the math required, but my “brief” explanation started to take over this letter, so I posted it separately:
»»> Click here to Count Like a Player. «««
Keep that handy, and you’ll be ready for the casino. TL;DR? The math is against you.
But dollars aren’t math. We only count dollars with math.
Not only can money not buy everything, money can’t even buy everything money can buy.
The first part is common sense, I’ll highlight the second part, because it’s easy to miss—at least, it was easy for me to miss.
Money can’t buy everything money can buy.
$250,000 is “a quarter of a million dollars.” You can buy a gently used Rolls Royce for a quarter of of a million dollars. However, for a quarter of one dollar, you cannot buy one millionth of a Rolls Royce (at least, not in any useful way). For a quarter you can buy a gumball.
Let’s try that the other way. What can you buy for one millionth of a quarter? If anything, only some other form of money.
One “million dollar” is a very different thing than one dollar a million times in the same way that a Rolls Royce is a very different thing than one-million gumballs. Reason does not fix the relative value of a 50-million-dollar prize and any number of one-at-a-time dollars.
Using Reasonable, I’ll still tell you the lottery is a terrible idea, but I can’t tell you the universe whispered that “fact” in my ear.
