Comment by brookst
7 hours ago
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a book about the American shift from “a hard day’s work for fair pay” to what I’m calling the lottery economy.
Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work. Hence, my theory goes, the rise of actual lotteries along with influencers, injury lawyers, and schemes like New Orleans.
Something is seriously wrong when family members hope an elderly relative will die on the hospital so they can get a payout, or when people are crashing into trucks or promoting BS snake oil on instagram.
It’s an indictment of the people involved for sure, but our social and economic systems have created the perverse incentives that these people are betting on. And it seems to be accelerating.
Exactly how many investors do you think are investing in New Orleans East? I drive around and I see signs on telephone poles for people promoting renting cars so you can rent it to other people for income like Uber or something.
Probably none? I certainly didn’t mean to imply there is significant investment.
You might enjoy The Wire
"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."
It's basically all about people in systems, and as I recall one of the points made is the broken social contract, which was once "you don't have to be the smartest, but if you show up and work hard, there's a place for you to earn a living" -- now it feels like trying to outswim a rising tide of required education and expertise and hollowed-out career paths
I do not buy this. There is plenty of money in “traditional” work, and immigrants from all over the world find it and do it. If uneducated people, who may speak English as a second language at best, can move around the US and find their footing, then surely almost all who grew up here with access to the language and public schools can.
And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming.
Edit: and of course, there were literal lawyers ordering up these collisions and litigating the fraud. This is just organized crime dangling a lottery payout to poorer people.
America might have been booming, but wages were dropping in real terms throughout that period.
And the heroes are the people who buck the system and made a fortune quickly. Not the people who toil away consistently at a job and incrementally build a modest living over decades. So of course everyone wants to be a hero.
Add in Crypto, and Day Trading, and more recently the prediction markets. All of whom specifically target "normal" folks with promises of huge riches won from a few hours work and a bit of luck. Of course, very, very, very few people actually make any money at all from any of this, but survivor bias occludes that and all they see is the easy money.
The lottery works exactly the same way. The odds of me, specifically, winning the lottery is effectively nil. But every week there's some lucky person who wins. If you have any kind of education then this becomes an obvious no-win proposition, and buying a ticket is just throwing away money. But even with such an education, and understanding of probability, I've been desperate enough to buy a ticket in the past.
In Australia we've seen the rise (and rise) of gambling as an industry. For exactly the same reasons. Making a quick fortune is the goal. Working a normal job is for suckers and losers. And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit. Might as well gamble those savings in the hope of getting a win big enough to actually afford the deposit.
The system is broken. We need to fix it or tear it down.
Median real wages: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
2 replies →
> Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work.
I don't think it's that "fewer people can make a living". It's just that we have too many amoral people who won't work.
It's a shame the New Yorker article didn't talk much about the true victims here: the innocent truck drivers.
Thats bs...it says right in the article that the payout for a trailer truck accident can be a million usd. Pretty sure that is a major attraction to the 25% of NO that lives in poverty.
The traits in a person that lead them to a life of perpetual poverty are the same traits that make this type of "lottery" winning seem desirable.
6 replies →