[brookst]

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a book about the American shift from “a hard day’s work for fair pay” to what I’m calling the lottery economy.

Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work. Hence, my theory goes, the rise of actual lotteries along with influencers, injury lawyers, and schemes like New Orleans.

Something is seriously wrong when family members hope an elderly relative will die on the hospital so they can get a payout, or when people are crashing into trucks or promoting BS snake oil on instagram.

It’s an indictment of the people involved for sure, but our social and economic systems have created the perverse incentives that these people are betting on. And it seems to be accelerating.

[lotsofpulp]

I do not buy this. There is plenty of money in “traditional” work, and immigrants from all over the world find it and do it. If uneducated people, who may speak English as a second language at best, can move around the US and find their footing, then surely almost all who grew up here with access to the language and public schools can.

And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming.

Edit: and of course, there were literal lawyers ordering up these collisions and litigating the fraud. This is just organized crime dangling a lottery payout to poorer people.

[marcus_holmes]

America might have been booming, but wages were dropping in real terms throughout that period.

And the heroes are the people who buck the system and made a fortune quickly. Not the people who toil away consistently at a job and incrementally build a modest living over decades. So of course everyone wants to be a hero.

Add in Crypto, and Day Trading, and more recently the prediction markets. All of whom specifically target "normal" folks with promises of huge riches won from a few hours work and a bit of luck. Of course, very, very, very few people actually make any money at all from any of this, but survivor bias occludes that and all they see is the easy money.

The lottery works exactly the same way. The odds of me, specifically, winning the lottery is effectively nil. But every week there's some lucky person who wins. If you have any kind of education then this becomes an obvious no-win proposition, and buying a ticket is just throwing away money. But even with such an education, and understanding of probability, I've been desperate enough to buy a ticket in the past.

In Australia we've seen the rise (and rise) of gambling as an industry. For exactly the same reasons. Making a quick fortune is the goal. Working a normal job is for suckers and losers. And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit. Might as well gamble those savings in the hope of getting a win big enough to actually afford the deposit.

The system is broken. We need to fix it or tear it down.

[lotsofpulp]

>And the heroes are the people who buck the system and made a fortune quickly. Not the people who toil away consistently at a job and incrementally build a modest living over decades. So of course everyone wants to be a hero.

I don't see what this has to do with anything. For all of human history, it has been easier to steal than to earn.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

>And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit.

Maybe in Australia, but it was attainable in the US with home ownership in the 60%+ range.

https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

[YZF]

Median real wages: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

[jessegeens]

Yes, which proves the point, no? In Q1 of 1979 the real median wages were 335. In Q3 of 2014 they were 336. Which means that from 1979 to 2014 workers did not see any increase in their salary. In that same period, GDP per capita (and thus the economic output of the country and thus the economic output of its workers) almost doubled. The country became richer, workers became more efficient, but they did not get any part of the gains.

[YZF]

No?

The point was > but wages were dropping in real terms throughout that period

> And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming

There are economic cycles but the trend is clearly up. Funny enough, the 80's and the 90's which I think many people recall as great times were maybe more flat overall and the last 15 years feel worse. To be honest we also need to look at unemployment and perhaps other metrics. But the story that real wages were dropping is not supported by the data.

[isolatedsystem]

Now adjust it for inflation.

[nickff]

‘Real’ means inflation-adjusted.

[steve-atx-7600]

Part of what you’re alluding to, I think, is the important influence of culture. It is difficult to talk about without being accused of racism. I think it’s fair to say that not all cultures are equally effective as far as upward mobility. How to change culture would be a helpful thing to understand.

[selimthegrim]

Exactly how many investors do you think are investing in New Orleans East? I drive around and I see signs on telephone poles for people promoting renting cars so you can rent it to other people for income like Uber or something.

[brookst]

Probably none? I certainly didn’t mean to imply there is significant investment.

[cucumber3732842]

I follow local politics in my own city of similar means.

The juice isn't worth the squeeze for bigco corporate developers (though they're not above doing something if perfect circumstances pop up) and the long tail of mom and pop investors, slumlord and "maybe you can rent my cousin's vacant storefront for your shop" type investment activity that would normally make those investments and over time uplift a community have been kicked out of the game by the regulation that municipalities have been forced by the states (who themselves are often forced by the feds) to adopt as a pre-requisite to qualifying for federal grant funding for the projects they need that funding to afford because without it they can't do so in a manner compliant with applicable law.

[selimthegrim]

In the 1970s the East was a lot of couples working in the booming oil industry so a lot of the housing stock dates from then. When the oil bust happened they decamped to the Northshore or Houston.

[anonymars]

You might enjoy The Wire

"You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."

It's basically all about people in systems, and as I recall one of the points made is the broken social contract, which was once "you don't have to be the smartest, but if you show up and work hard, there's a place for you to earn a living" -- now it feels like trying to outswim a rising tide of required education and expertise and hollowed-out career paths

[fortran77]

> Fewer and fewer people can make a decent living with traditional work.

I don't think it's that "fewer people can make a living". It's just that we have too many amoral people who won't work.

It's a shame the New Yorker article didn't talk much about the true victims here: the innocent truck drivers.

[Throaway199999]

Thats bs...it says right in the article that the payout for a trailer truck accident can be a million usd. Pretty sure that is a major attraction to the 25% of NO that lives in poverty.

[gottorf]

The traits in a person that lead them to a life of perpetual poverty are the same traits that make this type of "lottery" winning seem desirable.

[Throaway199999]

HAHAHAHA

So, how about the dozens of lawyers and doctors in the story? You know, the ones who made 90% of the money and never got charged? The ones who set the whole thing up because they knew they could convince desperate & uneducated people? The ones who orchestrated a murder (the thing that finally got two of them caught)?

What're their "traits?" Did you even read the article?

[brookst]

Traits like ethics? Yes, that was my point.

[gottorf]

I'm talking about traits like high time preference and poor impulse control.

Ethics make people live in poverty? That would be news to a lot of people.

[brookst]

It’s a really good article if you read it. The people who got rich were not the poor people.

[Thegn]

‘Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage,’ he said.

- Terry Pratchett

The poor have ethics just like the rest of us. They just can’t afford to keep it.

[bombcar]

Pratchett goes into it more when talking about the “proud” poor - which is a real subset of the population.

You can see an example in the rural poor who refuse to take “government cheese”.