Adam Smith on Lotteries – Econlib

Certainly one of my delights in making ready my current discuss on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, a chat I’ll publish within the subsequent few days, is that I learn substantial sections of the e book that I hadn’t learn earlier than. Whereas I’ve typically thought his prose bogs down, I discovered many situations with terse, crystal-clear reasoning. A working example is his tight reasoning on lotteries:

With the intention to have a greater likelihood for among the nice prizes, some individuals buy a number of tickets, and others, small share in a nonetheless larger quantity. There may be not, nonetheless, a extra sure proposition in arithmetic than that the extra tickets you journey upon, the extra possible you’re to be a loser. Journey upon all of the tickets within the lottery, and also you lose for sure; and the larger the variety of your tickets the nearer you method to this certainty.