This is why we love blogging, and bloggers, so: I can unplug completely from Swedish media for the duration of the summer vacation, secure in the knowledge that should important investigative reporting surface, my favorite blogs will have it, prechewed into bite-sized morsels even.
And so it is with Gudmundson, who points us in the direction of a truly revelatory piece in Dagens Nyheter by Bernt Hermele about where the proceeds of Swedish lottery winnings go.
Sweden’s lotteries, like in the UK, are a government-controlled monopoly. In the UK, a neutral commission ensures that one selected operator, Camelot, complies with its license, and that all but the smallest profit margin funds “good causes.” Precisely which good causes are funded is a matter of careful public scrutiny. Some Brits I know even justify their buying of lottery tickets by saying they do it for a good cause.
That justification is, of course, mere self-deception. If it’s a good cause you’d like to fund, much better to give the entire amount, without middlemen to feed, and you’d get a tax deduction to boot. There is no way of getting around the fact that lotteries are a stupidity tax: You only play if you are completely incapable of grasping just how improbable winning is. The defence — that the ticket buyer is not calculating probabilities but paying to participate in a fantasy — turns lotteries into a state church of the here and now, requiring faith in rewards in this life. If anything, lotteries trump religion: they produce verifiable miracles like clockwork; somebody always winsCall me cynical, but what is religious belief other than placing high odds on there being a moral God and an afterlife?.
In the UK, precisely because the proceeds do go to transparently good causes, the lottery business is probably benign, with most likely a net positive utility for society (it’s hard to calculate, given opportunity costs and the rent-seeking activities of the lottery organizers)In comparison, it’s less certain that going to church is benign: Felix and Michelle and I had this argument in a church in Glasgow converted into an excellent restaurant. My argument went like this: While religious people are more likely than unbelievers to do charity work, thus increasing the utility of those in their immediate surroundings, there is still the problem that attending church is a vote for the dogma of the particular denomination one attends. Attend a Catholic church and you are voting with your presence for infallibly moronic positions on contraception, for example, and medieval attitudes to women, both of which lower society’s utility far more than can be counteracted by helping out in a Catholic soup kitchen.
It turns out that my reasoning is wrong, however: the current isssue of the Economist, in an article on philantropy, shows the atheist Dutch and Swedes actually contributing a far larger portion of their GDP — almost double — to doing good than do the markedly more religious Americans. That flies in the face of received wisdom, my own assumptions, and those who argue that high taxes are immoral because they stifle the incentive to behave charitably. The Economist got their data, below, from the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.
. In Sweden, however, it’s easier to reach a verdict: Only the state, horseracing organizations and “popular national movements” (folkrörelser) are allowed to run lotteries, according to DN. The two stated reasons: This monopoly limits “lottery abuse” (the same line of argument as the one justifying the existence of the state alcohol monopoly, Systembolaget); and it guarantees that lottery profits go to the “common good” or “public ends” (allmänna ändamål). “Common good” here is defined as, wait for it, the financing of a political party, specifically the ruling Social Democratic Party, SAP, and its youth wing, the SSU. In fact, 40% of their combined 2002 annnual revenues, 80 million kronor of 200 million, was from lottery proceeds. Neither the SAP nor the SSU is particularly keen to publicize this, obviously.
Other political parties have the right to run lotteries too if they want to (and the Center Party brings in a few million kroner this way, says DN). This doesn’t make it right, though. It is beyond me why political parties should have such a cushy funding option, especially when most Swedes buying lottery tickets seem to have no idea that many of these directly fund the ruling party machinery.
The solution: Abolish the monopoly; privatize lotteries, much like Sweden has already “privatized” the Church of Sweden. If you want to support the Social Democrats, by all means buy Social Democrat lottery tickets, as long as they are clearly labelled as such. Feel like supporting another party when you inevitably lose? Buy into their lottery offerings instead. Or buy Greenpeace lottery tickets. or Médecins Sans Frontières tickets. In any case, the internet is coming to the rescue, soon felling this particular Social Democratic money tree: There is nothing stopping Swedes from betting online with foreign companies.
