I remember that years ago there was in Spain a famous song announcing the lottery. It said, “The hope of every day is to share the ticket of the ONCE”. ONCE (the Spanish National Organization of the Blind) is an entity well known in the country for their lottery tickets, and the money obtained from these tickets benefits the many charitable activities that the organization carries out for the blind. Recently, this song came to mind while I was thinking about our reality in the Dominican Republic. Throughout the country—a nation with an extreme poverty rate of 6% and a moderate poverty rate of 29%—the disproportionate number of posts that sell lottery ticket, which one can find in every corner, even in the most isolated and unfortunate villages, is notable. It has been estimated that there are 154 lottery exchanges for every public school in the Dominican Republic.
Of course, there is a reason for that: it is so difficult to fulfill one’s big dreams with the product of the daily work that many people decide to enjoy life in other ways. They do it by installing satellite dishes and watching endless soap operas, they do it by alienating themselves consuming alcohol, or by celebrating special occasions with big parties. Yet another way is to dream about winning the lottery: for only a little money, one could win a major prize. However, this “small” amount of money, wasted day after day, becomes an important expense —and often an addiction.
If you think about this reality, it could make you want to bang your head against a wall trying to understand how one squanders the small amount of money one obtains from work, instead of better using it to cover basic family needs. Nevertheless, you must place yourself in the other person’s situation, in order to try to understand. Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, in their book “Poor Economics” observe that precisely the little things that make life less tiring are a priority for the poor, who, in place of raging against fate, endure it. Therefore, in many cases, instead of ignoring whims and focusing on necessities, people do just the opposite. They are lenient with themselves because they are skeptical about their supposed opportunities and the possibility of radical change in their lives. And indeed, they have many reasons to be skeptical! They ask themselves if it’s worth the trouble to sacrifice for an unlikely change, which, in addition can arrive too late.
In any case, regarding the lottery, the reality is that in the Dominican Republic its proliferation damages the lowest economic classes. The bishop of San Juan de la Maguana, Msgr. José Grullon, usually promotes from the pulpit an attitude of saving money and organizing the family’s finances as a better way of fighting poverty than hoping for the unlikely prize to come. In his homilies, he often mentions—with his typical common sense— that the only one who gets rich with the lottery is the owner of the lottery business. How right he is!
We really hope that for more and more people the real “hope of every day” might be the hope of a good job, the hope of sending the children to school, and thus gaining the opportunity of a better future. It surely is a stronger bet than the expectation of obtaining a more than improbable prize; most of the time, while waiting for it, the domestic economy suffers—and it’s all for nothing.
