Lottery-Like Prizes Coax Savings. What’s the Risk in Expanding Them?

Re:Lottery-Like Prizes Coax Savings. What’s the Risk in Expa... by warent on Friday December 21, 2018 @05:58PM (#18737459)

This is a very useful perspective on the positives of lotteries. I've always found them to be bogus, borderline theft. But when you consider the fact that it mitigates--almost entirely removing--more shady versions of the game, it makes lotteries seem more like a necessary evil for the time being.

However, that's not to say that the government couldn't do a better job of educating the public on it. Lotteries are definitely aggrandized with all the bells and whistles to make people feel like they have a real shot at winning which I would argue could draw in people who wouldn't have played--lottery, numbers games, or otherwise.

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Re:Lottery-Like Prizes Coax Savings. What’s the Risk in Expa... by tareqak on Friday December 21, 2018 @07:45PM (#18738078)

Couldn’t the government do the same for other kinds of vice (drugs, prostitution)? They could permit activities to the level where you get a power law kind of trade-off between consumption and risk from consumption so as to monitor and educate participants over a long period of time (more than 80/20 for behaviour with more detrimental outcomes). You also get the benefit to study the behaviour and figure out how it works in order to have truly effective solutions through repeated experiments etc.

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