Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

Voltaire called it “a tax on stupidity.”

Statisticians tell you that you have a better chance of being hit by falling debris from an airplane.


Economists call it a tax on the poor, because the least well-off among us spend a far bigger share of their incomes on it.

And it doesn’t ever matter.

As soon as the numbers grow big enough, tens of millions of Americans will head to their convenience stores for a virtually nonexistent chance to strike it very, very rich. More than 280 million Mega Millions tickets were sold for last Friday’s drawings, when there was—for the 26th consecutive week—no winner. By Tuesday night, with a $1.6 billion first prize at stake, even more tickets surely will be sold. Throw in Wednesday’s Powerball jackpot of $620 million, and—unlike the lottery itself—it’s a good bet that there will be a lottery ticket purchased for every man, woman and child in the nation this week.

It’s a national celebration of illusion, in which citizens and media alike are happily complicit. We never see long lines and hysterical news reports when the jackpots are, say $40 million, although for most of us—say, 99 percent—a $40 million prize would change our lives significantly. But once the numbers move up into the half-billion dollar range, the allure of the prize becomes irresistible. (“Now it’s worth it!”).

Once the jackpot reaches the stratosphere, the media go nuts, with the same story on almost every broadcast. “Lotto Fever hits [your town’s name here],” it begins. Long lines of happy customers wave at the camera. The reporter asks the customers, “What will you do if you win?” The reporter never asks, “How much do you spend on the lottery?” or “Do you realize how much you would have by now if you put that money into an investment account?”

The story certainly never mentions buzzkill facts like these, from Investopedia: “In California, a study found that 40 percent of those who played the lottery were unemployed; in Maryland, the poorest one-third of its population buys 60% of all lottery tickets; and in Michigan, people without a high school diploma spent five times more on the lottery than those with a college education.” Nor is there much appetite to cite a report by the North American Foundation for Gambling Addiction Help that there are nearly 10 million people in the United States who struggle with a gambling habit.

Instead, the story ends with the reporter holding up her ticket, telling the anchors that, “if I win, you won’t be seeing me tomorrow!”

News outlets might take a cue from Pasadena, Calif., public radio station KPCC, which found that contributions to education from the California lottery—the principal reason cited for establishing it in the first place—had remained essentially static in California over the past 12 years, despite a doubling of revenues.

There’s a logical conclusion from all of this: No rational person should spend a dime on a Mega Millions ticket or Powerball ticket, right?

Well, that’s right if you’re spending 5 percent or 10 percent of an inadequate income on lottery tickets. But for the average buyer, the obvious foolishness of hoping for a 1 in 300 million win is balanced by the “psychic income” that you get with your $2.

What is psychic income? Merriam-Webster defines it as: “Rewards (as in prestige, leisure, or pleasant surroundings) not measurable in terms of money or goods.” Most of us might not be able to taste the difference between a $100 bottle of wine and a $20 bottle, but the mere fact that we’ve paid a princely sum for the wine delivers its own satisfaction.

In the case of a lottery ticket, the psychic income comes in the form of two or three days of richly rewarding fantasies. They may be material: “Here’s the house I’m going to buy, the car I’ll be driving, the travel I’ll begin.” They may be deliciously vengeful: “Here’s what I’m going to tell my boss or supervisor or shop steward before I quit; let me see the look on the face of my family member who scorned me as a failure.” They may be noble: “Here’s the education I can guarantee to every child in my extended family; here’s the hundreds of millions I can donate to worthy causes all over the world; here is every person who’s helped me or shown me kindness in my life that I can reward.”

These fantasies may even lack any coherence at all. The simple prospect of a sudden arrival of massive, unearned money can unsettle even the most rational of people. Years ago, my wife and I were having dinner at the home of a psychologist. When he heard that he might have four winning numbers, he spent 15 minutes frantically trying to learn how much he’d won. “Ring for the elevator!” he told one of his children. “Those guys always know how the lottery works!” (He calmed down only when he learned that he had three winning numbers, which won him nothing.)

It is as ludicrous to spend more than 10 seconds planning what to do with these prizes as it is to cower when we walk outside for fear of falling space debris. We know what the lust for unearned riches can do to the human spirit; writers from Mark Twain (“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”) to Terry Southern (The Magic Christian) have told us. We know that state governments are happy to create a voluntary tax that lures the least comfortable among us and that the media are happy to feed these illusions.

But at another level, if things break the right way, this will be the last column of mine you’ll ever read.