As a champion of science and reason people often ask me, "Jack, what's a rational system for winning the lottery?" Fortunately there is a simple answer: Don't Play.
The expected return is the average payout (V), times the probability of winning (p), minus the cost of the tickets (C).
Vp - C
The key observation is that p is basically zero. It's not exactly zero, of course, just astronomically small for any reasonable value of C. The point is that despite the fallacy that says someone's going to win so it might as well be me, it won't be you. Your personal chance of winning is, for all intents and purposes, zero. This means the only thing you can control is C, how much you spend buying lottery tickets.
Similar logic can be applied to the filibuster. The cost/benefit of filibustering the nomination of Samuel Alito is only slightly more complex than the one above. The return is the expected value of the outcome of the act, minus the certain cost of the act, plus (or minus) the values of different potential outcomes multiplied by their probabilities.
Vrpr + Vmpm + Vsps - C + R
This political calculus is not particularly hard to compute in GOP-controlled Washington. Vr is the value of the reward that the Republicans will give to Democrats for going along with their nomination. The probability of this, like the probability of winning the lottery, is uniformly zero. Support the filibuster or oppose it, the rewards will be the same. Nothing.
Vm is the change in media coverage a Democrat might get from taking one action or the other. Again the probability of positive media coverage, pm, is zero. If the Democratic caucus cannot get 41 votes together they will be painted as buffoons who can't agree on anything. If they can and manage to block the cloture vote, they will be portrayed as obstructionists. As for a negative change, how could Democrat's media coverage could get any worse than it already is?
Vs are the swing votes that a Senator might pick up through their stand. Given that swing voters seem to make their decisions based on either personal economics or what they have seen in the most recent attack ads, the probability of this issue having any effect there is again identically zero.
Now let's look at the terms that the Senators themselves can directly control. C is the direct cost of employing the filibuster. Despite what some Senators say about somehow keeping the filibuster safe by not using it, the actual cost is zero. It doesn't cost any money to filibuster, and with modern Senate rules it no longer takes any time. The filibuster power also doesn't get used up the more you practice it. It's no more potent if you use it only once than if you use it a hundred times.
Finally R is the value of the actual issue itself. With no filibuster the cost we pay is Alito on the Supreme Court. Despite his bogus attempts to be enigmatic, we know exactly what this will mean, and it will be very, very bad. He's an outspoken opponent of civil liberties, voter protection, worker and consumer rights. Using the filibuster, we don't get Alito on the court. That outcome by itself is virtually priceless.
There may be other terms in the equation -- terms that you and I as mere citizens are not allowed to see or evaluate -- but I suspect that the fundamental analogy is right. Democratic congressmen keep buying their GOP lotto tickets thinking that this time it'll pay off for them, never quite realizing the game is rigged. We pay the price for their self-delusion.
- jack*
Odds of winning the lottery: I like to distinguish between "lottery" and what's called "Lotto" (that's a trade name, I think a portmanteau of lottery and Keno), here.
To me, a lottery has a certain fixed number of tickets/entries, one of which is drawn as the winner and gets the full first prize, which is a known fixed sum. Lotto is based on the old UK "Pools" where any number can enter into one draw, and more than one entry can get whatever the winning combination of numbers is; often the overall prize amount varies depending on receipts from the number of entries.
The odds of winning a Lotto-style competition are usually vastly higher against than a lottery.
In New South Wales the Lottery Office used to sell 100,000 tickets in each draw of its most popular version ($2 ticket/$100,000 prize). Now it's 150,000, so you know the odds are 150,000 to 1. When Lotto started you picked 6 numbers from 36 choices. Now it's 6 from 44. I've seen a calculation that puts the odds at around 37,000,000 to 1; or it could have been 3.7 million to 1. Lots more than 0.15 million to 1, anyway. And when a popular combination of numbers wins, the prize gets split among quite a few winners.
My mother bought a lottery ticket every pay day for maybe 50 years, and did win a number of minor prizes, ranging from say $10 to $100 over that time (overall not at a profit). I've actually worked with someone who won first prize - it wasn't enough to retire on at her age, but she'd set herself up well. Now I know lots of people who've got payouts from Lotto at the $5-$20 level, but don't know anyone with more than that.
Posted by: Epacris | July 25, 2006 at 04:51 AM