James Harvey
wasn’t the first person to take advantage of a poorly designed state lottery.
Gerald Selbee’s group made millions on Michigan’s original WinFall game before
the state got wise and shut it down in 2005. And the practice goes back much
further. In the early eighteenth century, France financed government spending
by selling bonds, but the interest rate they offered wasn’t enticing enough to
drive sales. To spice the pot, the government attached a lottery to the bond
sales. Every bond gave its holder the right to buy a ticket for a lottery with
a 500,000-livre prize, enough money to live on comfortably for decades. But
Michel Le Peletier des Forts, the deputy finance minister who conceived the
lottery plan, had botched the computations; the prizes to be disbursed
substantially exceeded the money to be gained in ticket receipts. In other
words, the lottery, like Cash WinFall on roll-down days, had a positive
expected value for the players, and anyone who bought enough tickets was due
for a big score.
One person who
figured this out was the mathematician and explorer Charles-Marie de La
Condamine; just as Harvey would do almost three centuries later, he gathered
his friends into a ticket-buying cartel. One of these was the young writer
François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. While he may not have
contributed to the mathematics of the scheme, Voltaire placed his stamp on it.
Lottery players were to write a motto on their ticket, to be read aloud when a
ticket won the jackpot; Voltaire, characteristically, saw this as a perfect
opportunity to epigrammatize, writing cheeky slogans like “All men are equal!”
and “Long live M. Peletier des Forts!” on his tickets for public consumption
when the cartel won the prize.
Eventually, the
state caught on and canceled the program, but not before La Condamine and
Voltaire had taken the government for enough money to be rich men for the rest
of their lives. What—you thought Voltaire made a living writing perfectly
realized essays and sketches? Then, as now, that’s no way to get rich.
Eighteenth-century
France had no computers, no phones, no rapid means of coordinating information
about who was buying lottery tickets and where: you can see why it took the
government some months to catch on to Voltaire and Le Condarmine’s scheme.
