Original in Spanish: La lotería al principio era asequible
Turns out that at first the lottery had numbers people could pay for without trouble.
Then the clever ones started complaining that it was a tax on the poor and so on and so forth.
So they decided to make lottery numbers very expensive. The idea was that if the numbers were very expensive, the poor wouldn’t buy them.
Then the poor decided to band together and buy one number among many, and that’s how participaciones were born. A backfire in full rule.
And that’s why we now have the whole mess of décimos, series and participaciones that we have. It’s also why the lottery hits groups of more or less connected people, and why we have that fear of “what if it hits everyone except me”.
Some people buy insurance against envy rather than hope.
I didn’t hear about it at the time, but apparently in 2011, in a Spanish village called Sodeto, the Gordo hit the entire village except one guy, who instead of slitting his wrists made a documentary.
This podcast is the business:
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/el-gordo/
Related: 99% Invisible
(Facebook, 2017-07-29)