Lottery Madness

Norm blogs here about the Geras household's regular purchasing of national lottery tickets. According to an article he refers to in the New York Times, playing the lottery is not an investment but a disposable consumer purchase that leads to 'transforming fantasies' and can accommodate incidental pleasures like indulging your 'number superstitions'.

Hmm. Okay. I've found that I'm perfectly capable of transforming fantasies without having to spend any money at all, but his reflections caused me to recall a conversation I recently had with a friend on the platform at Laytown station.

It transpired that the previous night she had been round at another friend's house where everyone was invited to have their fortune told/palm read by a local psychic (don't ask me why, but women around our way seem to love these "psychic parties"; maybe they've bought everything from the Anne Summers and Tupperware catalogues at this point). Anyway, my friend had been told that she would win some money at the weekend in the national lottery. She was over the moon at the prospect.

"So," I said to her, "I take it you haven't bought any lottery tickets." She looked at me like I was an idiot.

"Of course I have," she said. "I've actually bought twice as many as I usually do."

I looked at her like she was an idiot.

"But if that statement made by the fortune teller was a true statement, why was there any need for you to spend any money on a lottery ticket? Either she was forecasting the future, in which case there was no need for you to do anything, or she was not forecasting the future and just making it up as she went along, in which case you could have spent your money on something more useful, such as Tupperware."

She continued to think that I was an idiot, of course, and on Monday morning we discussed an entirely different topic as we both avoided the subject of her continued poverty.