From the Annals of Oblivious Obviousness

The post on Hüsker Dü's swansong live album, The Living End, will have to wait for another day while I come to terms with a shocking new research finding.

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have found that "when people thought their earnings were below a certain standard, they were more prone to take [financial] risks." In particular, poor people are more likely to purchase lottery tickets than are affluent people, according to some simulations. This is truly shocking to me, but absolutely not in the way the researchers undoubtedly intended and not least because the researchers defined "poor" as having an annual income of less than $100,000.

I did not make this up. The worst part of this is that I don't even know where to begin mocking Professor George Loewenstein and his colleagues.

I'll spin the wheel and start by asking, "In what version of America is 'anything less than a hundred grand a year' considered poor?" Most college professors don't make that kind of money, and damn sure hell none of the graduate students who actually collected the data and ran the equations for the lotto study do. Using $100,000 as the boundary between affluence and abjectness indicates how out of touch with reality the researchers are.

Another screaming beacon of the researchers' obliviousness is that they would consider it noteworthy that people who are not rich buy lottery tickets. How could they not already know that people who are not well off wish to become well off?

I'm reminded of a special seminar I attended when I was a first-year graduate student. I had just spent the previous year working a succession of temporary, minimum-wage, hard-labor jobs on construction site and in warehouses and factories. The woman giving the seminar had just published a book about her interviews with minimum wage workers. She opened with a "joke" about how happy it made one group of workers to get a pizza party after exceeding a monthly production goal. "Isn't it horrible how they could be so motivated by something so insignificant," the woman asked rhetorically.

"Christ! You're an idiot," I replied as I kicked over my chair and stomped out of the room.

To state the reality of reality very simply, and with the expenditure of no research dollars or the killing of any trees, when folks ain't got, they want. If someone who usually goes without lunch gets a free one, you bet your ass he'll be happy about it. In the same vein, someone who has two bucks left over after buying the week's groceries and paying off the most urgent bills can easily be excused for betting those two dollars against the chance of winning wealth she can't even really imagine.

Which brings me to truly idiotic piece of Loewenstein's et al.'s pointless research. According to Reuters, the group determined that people who earned less than $100,000 per year "bought 1.27 lottery tickets compared to 0.67 by people who earned more." Leaving the news service's atrocious grammar aside, note that rich people do play the lotto. Aren't they the people who are being, as Loewenstein accuses the non-wealthy of being, "somewhat perverse since every time you buy a lottery ticket, it's the equivalent of burning money." I mean if a person is already financially secure, he would be much better served by saving, investing, or spending on luxuries any money left over after he met his obligations.

A poor person who purchases exactly one more lottery ticket than a rich person (double .67 is actually a little more than 1.27, but close enough), at least has the excuse of betting on hope. The rich person, if he or she spends any money on lottery tickets, is being frivolous at best and greedy at worst.

As for myself, I'm like that guy in the Too Much Joy song. "I'm neither hungry, or poor/ But I'm rarely satisfied." At the same time, and by the same band, "I've never met the poor/ But all my friends are broke."

I buy Mega Millions tickets when the jackpot goes over $100 million. I have the income to dispose, and I won $11 on my last three rounds of buying a total of $25 worth of numbers. I'll call $14 a fair trade for the time I spent daydreaming about how I'd spend the jackpot. Maybe next time, Academy of Hope.