I do not buy this. There is plenty of money in “traditional” work, and immigrants from all over the world find it and do it. If uneducated people, who may speak English as a second language at best, can move around the US and find their footing, then surely almost all who grew up here with access to the language and public schools can.

And the people in this article are born in the 1960s and 1970s, in the decades that followed, America was booming.

Edit: and of course, there were literal lawyers ordering up these collisions and litigating the fraud. This is just organized crime dangling a lottery payout to poorer people.

America might have been booming, but wages were dropping in real terms throughout that period.

And the heroes are the people who buck the system and made a fortune quickly. Not the people who toil away consistently at a job and incrementally build a modest living over decades. So of course everyone wants to be a hero.

Add in Crypto, and Day Trading, and more recently the prediction markets. All of whom specifically target "normal" folks with promises of huge riches won from a few hours work and a bit of luck. Of course, very, very, very few people actually make any money at all from any of this, but survivor bias occludes that and all they see is the easy money.

The lottery works exactly the same way. The odds of me, specifically, winning the lottery is effectively nil. But every week there's some lucky person who wins. If you have any kind of education then this becomes an obvious no-win proposition, and buying a ticket is just throwing away money. But even with such an education, and understanding of probability, I've been desperate enough to buy a ticket in the past.

In Australia we've seen the rise (and rise) of gambling as an industry. For exactly the same reasons. Making a quick fortune is the goal. Working a normal job is for suckers and losers. And there's a certain truth to this in a society that prizes home ownership, but keeps housing at a price level that means the average wage will never manage to save enough to afford the deposit. Might as well gamble those savings in the hope of getting a win big enough to actually afford the deposit.

The system is broken. We need to fix it or tear it down.