David McElroy

Economists say that a lottery is a tax on people who can’t do math. At a talk about five years ago, psychologist Dan Gilbert said you might as well flush the money down the toilet, because the odds of winning are almost identical to the odds that you’ll flush money down the toilet and millions of dollars will come back up. And the advantage of the toilet is that you’re saved a visit to the 7-Eleven to buy the tickets.

Now that the jackpot in the Mega Millions lottery has hit more than half a billion dollars, I’ve been surprised at the number of people I know who talk about heading across the Georgia line to buy some tickets. (There’s no state lottery in Alabama.) When I point out that it’s throwing money away, the excuse is that they’re “buying hope” with a few dollars.

What’s the worst thing that could happen? Based on the history of other big winners, the worst thing that could happen would be to win the money.

Take Jack Whittaker, for instance. In 2002, this West Virginia businessman won $315 million. In interviews after winning, he talked of giving some of the money to his church and he talked about the people he was going to help. Instead, his life turned out to be a nightmare. He started drinking heavily from the stress. He was robbed of more than half a million dollars at a strip club. His daughter and granddaughter were murdered. And a casino had to sue him over a $1.5 million check he wrote to cover gambling losses.

In 2007, Whittaker told ABC News that he wished he had never won the money.

“Since I won the lottery, I think there is no control for greed,” he said. “I think if you have something, there’s always someone else that wants it. I wish I’d torn that ticket up.”

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If you want the contract to write tests for New York City schools, you need to know ahead of time that you can’t mention a good portion of human existence in your questions. For at least the fifth year, the NYC schools have produced a list of 50 words or phrases that are banned on tests.

Some of them are vaguely reasonable, I suppose, but many veer in the direction of pure insanity.

You can’t mention birthdays or birthday celebrations, presumably because a tiny number of people don’t celebrate birthdays for religious reasons. You can’t mention dinosaurs, although that one is a mystery. (The CBS story above speculates that it’s because that might offend creationists, but creationists believe dinosaurs existed.) It’s verboten to mention home computers, although it’s perfectly fine to mention them in a school or library setting. I assume they think that kids aren’t aware that many people have computers at home these days.

Religion and religious holidays aren’t supposed to exist, for the most part. They’re also not supposed to talk about junk food, for some reason. Maybe they think kids are unaware of that, too. It’s hard to say. Don’t dare mention divorce or houses that have swimming pools, either.

NYC school chancellor Dennis Walcott seems surprised by the uproar and says the system is merely providing guidance to test-makers for grades 3 through 8.

“So we’re not an outlier in being politically correct,” Walcott said. “This is just making sure that test makers are sensitive in the development of their tests.”

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Where did you stand on the great Etch-a-Sketch controversy last week? Were you with Team Romney, which started the controversy with an ill-designed metaphor? Or were you with Team Santorum or Team Gingrich, which went on the attack by putting Etch-a-Sketch toys into the hands of their candidates to wave around on stage?

Or were you like the media and the pundits? Were you so busy gorging yourself on various forms of the Etch-a-Sketch metaphor — from every angle — that you pounced on any morsel that might sound like a new perspective on the goofy line?

Or were you more like me? I was vaguely aware of a very stupid controversy, but I pretty much ignored it — because it meant absolutely nothing.

The Etch-a-Sketch story is the latest example of something I’ve seen for more than 20 years. When you’re inside politics, you can tend to assume — without ever consciously deciding to — that people outside the political bubble care just as much as you do about the trivia inside that bubble. I was reminded of that Tuesday because of a short story in the Washington Post. A reporter from the Post seemed surprised that a poll shows that 55 percent of people never even heard of the whole Etch-a-Sketch silliness last week.

My experience is that most people inside of politics honestly think that the things they’re talking about are on the minds and lips of intelligent people everywhere. They believe that what they do is so Important — with a capital I — that everyone must know and care about it. It’s not a conscious thing. It’s just an attitude that you pick up among them. They believe — on some level — that people care about the subtleties of the political arguments they’re in the middle of with their opponents. The idea that most people don’t even care about a tempest in a teapot such as the Etch-a-Sketch episode would suggest that maybe what they spend all day doing isn’t as important as what they believe — and they can’t handle that.

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