Imagine if anyone could buy $5 worth of stock for the product they're buying at 7-11. Over-time these small purchases would let them amass a sizeable base of assets, and all the while they'd have a stake in parts of the real economy, which would incentivize them to invest time in learning how it works. The educational value alone would be enormous.
Instead we foolishly prohibit people from participating in many of the most lucrative sectors of the economy, which corrals them into low-value dead-end activities like playing the lottos. If you want someone to grow, you don't over-protect them. That applies to raising children, and it applies to governance of the public at large.
Yeah, and in ten years they might get $14, which will just give some extra profit to their creditors when they file for bankruptcy for unpaid medical bills, or be captured in a civil forfeiture. And if somehow they managed to keep it and actually save a couple grand, that just means they'll become ineligible for SNAP and lose much more in benefits.
People play the lottery because it represents something more than slaving yourself to make scraps. They are not stupid, and know the system is design to keep you poor, and that hoping to escape by amassing a few bucks is almost as delusional as expecting to win the lottery.
How is that any different than matching two numbers on a lotto ticket and winning $10, or $1000?
With real-world investing, especially in micro-caps, they have a chance to hit it big as well, and make millions. So it has the same dream escapist aspect. And it provides a much more solid grounding for the future than throwing money in a game that you are mathematically guaranteed to lose if you play long enough. Investing is not a game of pure chance, and it is not zero sum. With enough skill, you can actually make money, and your skill can improve over time, and doing so actually improves how the economy as a whole allocates capital.
That's immediately spendable; it doesn't sit somewhere where it can be taken (by illegal or legal means). That's also one of the reasons why people join susus instead of just saving, for example.
> With real-world investing, especially in micro-caps, they have a chance to hit it big as well, and make millions.
There's no change of making millions in a day, or week. The few "rags-to-riches" trading millionaires progressively amassed their money over at least a few years. But that means losing benefits, which people can't afford to risk. Like I said, the system is designed to keep them there, and they know it.
>>There's no change of making millions in a day, or week. The few "rags-to-riches" trading millionaires progressively amassed their money over at least a few years.
Crypto-assets have seen many thousands of percent gains in a matter of days. I don't know if you could turn $2 into a million in one week the way you can with a lotto, but the gains I think are substantial enough to compete for lotto spending, especially considering that odds of gains can be improved by the buyer through research and analysis.
The gvt lotto was not created before people played lottery, it was invented because people want to play chance games anyway and that's a great way to build roads at the same time.
I think the real market could be potentially more exciting than lottos, if regulations didn't prevent securities from being marketed the way lottos are. In a way, the token sale frenzy demonstrated that.