Lotteries have been used to make all kinds of public decisions ever since the days of Ancient Greece. They can contribute to some of our most important values, such as rationality, justice, and democracy. But until recently, there was no theory to make sense of lotteries and what they can do. The past few decades have changed that with a veritable renaissance of studies on lotteries. This book collects fourteen of the most important of these papers, and offers a critical introduction tying them together.
Lotteries have been used to make all kinds of public decisions ever since the days of Ancient Greece. They can contribute to some of our most important values, such as rationality, justice, and democracy. But until recently, there was no theory to make sense of lotteries and what they can do. The past few decades have changed that with a veritable renaissance of studies on lotteries. This book collects fourteen of the most important of these papers, and offers a critical introduction tying them together.
Chronicles the first decades of an informal lottery called the jogo do bicho, or animal game, which originated in Rio de Janeiro in 1892, and remains popular in Brazil today.
This book is about the virtues and social justice of random distribution. The first chapter is a utopian fragment about a future country, Aleatoria, where everything, including political power, jobs and money, is distributed by lottery. The rest of the book is devoted to considering the idea of the lottery in terms of the conventional components and assumptions of theories of justice, and to reviewing the possible applications of lottery distribution in contemporary society. This revised second edition includes a new introduction.
This book should be read by everyone who plays the state-run lotteries. Despite the fact that we players all know 'the odds are a million to one' against winning those big jackpots, most of us don't know the nature of these games or the math behind them or, yes, how to most effectively play them. In this groundbreaking book, you will learn: How to increase your chances of winning a jackpot that doesn't have to be shared with other players; How to tell when a jackpot becomes a 'positive expectation' bet and what that really means; How to keep the long arm of the government from getting its hands on significant portions of your wins; How to figure the odds on the various lotteries and the typical scratch-off tickets; How to find 'positive expectation' scratch-off games during special promotions.
Juries have been at the center of some of the most emotionally charged moments of political life. At the same time, their capacity for legitimate decision making has been under scrutiny, because of events like the acquittal of George Zimmerman by a Florida jury for the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the decisions of several grand juries not to indict police officers for the killing of unarmed black men. Meanwhile, the overall use of juries has also declined in recent years, with most cases settled or resolved by plea bargain. With Radical Enfranchisement in the Jury Room and Public Life, Sonali Chakravarti offers a full-throated defense of juries as a democratic institution. She argues that juries provide an important site for democratic action by citizens and that their use should be revived. The jury, Chakravarti argues, could be a forward-looking institution that nurtures the best democratic instincts of citizens, but this requires a change in civic education regarding the skills that should be cultivated in jurors before and through the process of a trial. Being a juror, perhaps counterintuitively, can guide citizens in how to be thoughtful rule-breakers by changing their relationship to their own perceptions and biases and by making options for collective action salient, but they must be better prepared and instructed along the way.
Lotteries in Colonial America examines the role lotteries played in the economic life of the colonies, as an alternative form of raising revenue for public and private projects that was utilized from the founding of Jamestown to the financing of the American Revolution.
This first comprehensive history of America's lottery obsession explores the spread of state lotteries and how players and policymakers alike got hooked on wishful dreams of an elusive jackpot. Every week, one in eight Americans place a bet on the dream of a life-changing lottery jackpot. Americans spend more on lottery tickets annually than on video streaming services, concert tickets, books, and movie tickets combined. The story of lotteries in the United States may seem straightforward: tickets are bought predominately by poor people driven by the wishful belief that they will overcome infinitesimal odds and secure lives of luxury. The reality is more complicated. For a Dollar and a Dream shows how, in an era of surging inequality and stagnant upward mobility, millions of Americans turned to the lottery as their only chance at achieving the American Dream. Gamblers were not the only ones who bet on betting. As voters revolted against higher taxes in the late twentieth century, states saw legalized gambling as a panacea, a way of generating a new source of revenue without cutting public services or raising taxes. Even as evidence emerged that lotteries only provided a small percentage of state revenue, and even as data mounted about their appeal to the poor, states kept passing them and kept adding new games, desperate for their longshot gamble to pay off. Alongside stories of lottery winners and losers, Jonathan Cohen shows how gamblers have used prayer to help them win a jackpot, how states tried to pay for schools with scratch-off tickets, and how lottery advertising has targeted lower income and nonwhite communities. For a Dollar and a Dream charts the untold history of the nation's lottery system, revealing how players and policymakers alike got hooked on hopes for a gambling windfall.
Luck of the Draw profiles past winners of big lotteries, and how their windfalls impacted their lives, mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse, such as the Florida widow who won $5 million in 1984: three years later, she lost her mansion and fancy cars, and owed the IRS $500,000 in back taxes, and was eventually arrested for trying to hire a contract killer for her daughter-in-law, whom she blamed for her lottery misfortune.
