Lottery Life

The lottery is really the iconic process of modern America: the flow of resources [the GOOD] from the many to the one. Other cultures have lotteries, but we play out the drama everywhere.

There are situations of attrition where only one survives; there are contests of every sort, some involving skill or talent while others are limited to chance. In some forms services or charitable resources are collected and distributed to one or a few newly fortunate unfortunates.

The big point is that there are no contrary examples; instances in which the flow of the good is from one or a few to the many. On TV, when millionaires give away their money it is always to one at a time. On a recent show a dozen people won the lottery, and the point of the show was to elucidate the inevitable mess and underscore how much better it is to have just one winner. And a news story about a girls soccer competition that de-emphasized final scores was organized around evidence of the futility of the effort.

Just by chance you would think that once or twice per decade the flow might reverse, but in what form?