This article is a reaction to a letter sent recently by a high school teacher of mathematics to a local newspaper. The teacher was complaining that, as regards gambling, the math teachers of the country have not done their duty. They have not driven home the brute fact that people who go into casinos or play the lot, on average, lose money. I have a somewhat different opinion.
People know very well that, on average, they lose money when they gamble.
I'm not going to run my life by averages. I'm going to really hit it big next time. Well, you might say that the market automatically does just that, and its answer seems to have resulted in the largest mania for gambling and the production of the largest legalized gambling industry that has ever flourished in this country. Moving away from gambling conceived narrowly as The Lot, The Wheel, or the chances that kids sell to enable the High School Band to buy uniforms, we are all fundamentally gamblers. The pop-philosophers even assure us that life is a worthwhile gamble, and so we indoctrinate our children into our personal perception of the common sense of living in a chancy world.