Babies, Death, and Other Things You Might Win In Babylon's Lottery

In his short story "The Lottery In Babylon," Jorge Luis Borges imagines a world where the lottery of trading small amounts for chances at larger amounts becomes insufficient. It becomes a bore. The cynicism of Babylon finally wins out and the lotteries begin to lose money. "They had no moral force whatsoever; they appealed not to all a man’s faculties, but only to his hopefulness." Indifference wins, and the lotteries are forced to retool, including not just losing tickets, but tickets allowing negative winnings.

A winner might pay a fine, or go to jail. Or perhaps worse. And not participating means you are considered a coward and outcast by society; few spurn the new lottery. Positive winnings expand beyond money, allowing for this new range of "losing." If you can "win" jail, it only seems fair that you can win the power of a jailer or judge. "Certain moralists argued that the possession of coins did not always bring about happiness, and that other forms of happiness were perhaps more direct," the story goes.

The lottery company grows as the domains and ranges of winnings and losings grow. Its realm becomes civilization itself and, thus, it becomes government, all of government. The lottery system grows beyond even government and industry still, out of a need for yet more points of entry into society, more things to put into the pot, as it were. And how can all of these winnings and losings be correctly the result of one act of chance? Chance must find its way into all aspects of the system for a correct system of probability. "Sometimes a single event—the murder of C in a tavern, B’s mysterious apotheosis—would be the inspired outcome of thirty or forty drawings," Borges’ narrator writes.

You see soon enough where Borges is going with his lottery. It grows and grows into nearly all facets of life are governed by some scheme of probability. Every act, every bit of fate is a roll or a ball drawn. It's like a perfect probability machine, but that's a contradiction (in which Borges forecasts quantum mechanics). "The Lottery is an interpolation of chance into the order of the universe, and observed that to accept errors is to strengthen chance, not contravene it." Eventually Babylon and the lottery that runs it is just "the world."

At the end, that the cycle refreshes and Babylon might just begin anew with a simple lottery of small amounts of money gambling for larger amounts. We could place ourselves within that cycle easily enough; you can win and lose many things that are not money in our world.

A baby

For a 25 GBP ticket, you could win 25,000 GBP worth of fertility treatment via the To Hatch non-profit. After being derailled initially by an ethics-related inquiry from the UK’s Charity Commission, this “win a baby” lottery is apparently still back on. So, get out there and win yourself a couple hundred-thousand dollar/pound commitment that will wind up hating you in the end anyway.

Odds: unknown

An awesome charter school education

Success Academy Charter Schools, which you may remember from the 2010 film The Lottery, receives about six applications for every single opening it has for new students. Qualified applicants are granted admissions based on the results of a random lottery; losers are sent back to the public school system to either help bail or scramble for another lifeboat.

Odds: about 1:6

America

The U.S. operates the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, e.g. the Green Card Lottery. 55,000 of these are allocated annually to people from countries deemed to have low rates of immigration to the U.S. Nearly all of Africa, save for the in-dispute territory of Western Sahara, and Europe (minus Great Britain), are eligible, along with Russia and most of the Middle East.

Odds: as of 2009, about 1:200

Not dying

In the early 2000s, the Oregon Health Plan, a program providing health care coverage to low-income families, was butchered by recession. Coverage went from around 100,000 people to just a couple of thousand. In 2008, a slight recovery allowed the Plan to add several thousand people. This was decided by lottery.

Odds: about 1:5 (based on 100,000 total eligible residents in 2008 and 22,000 available slots).

A job

Last year in Louisville, a Ford plant narrowed down a pool of 17,000 applicants for 1,000 open jobs down by lottery. This isn’t terribly uncommon it seems, particularly for relatively high-paying manufacturing/union jobs. A 2004 job lottery in Los Angeles for longshoreman jobs had around 75,000 applicants for 3,000 temporary jobs.

Odds: better than getting a job in journalism?

A basketball player

In which basketball teams are selected by lottery for who gets first (and second and so on) round player draft picks.

Odds: ranges from 1:200 to 1:4.

Fatigues

Hoooooray, the draft is over! At the moment anyway, and has been since 1973. However, U.S. male citizens are still required to register with the Selective Service, and it’s a fairly simple act for the president to reinstitute a draft.

Here’s how it would work, according to the Selective Service System’s website:

The lottery process begins with two large air mix drums. First, the air mix balls having date and month on them are loaded in one of the large drums. Using this same method, number from 1 to 365 (366 for men born in a leap year) on the air mix balls are loaded in the second drum. Official observers certify that all air mix balls were loaded in the Titan drawing machines. One air mix ball is drawn from the drum containing birth dates January 1 through December 31. One air mix ball is then drawn from the drum containing the sequence numbers from 1 through 365 (366 if the draft will call men born during a leap year) and the date and number are paired to establish the sequence number for each birth date. This is done in full view of all observers, officials, and the media. For example, if the date of August 4 is drawn first from the "date" drum, and the sequence number of 32 is drawn from the "number's" drum at the same time, then
those men turning 20 on August 4 would be ordered for induction processing only after men whose birthdays drew sequence numbers 1 through 31. The drawings continue until all 365 (or 366) birthdays of the year are paired with a sequence number. After the lottery is completed and results certified, the sequence of call is transmitted to the Selective Service System's Data Management Center. Almost immediately the first induction notices are prepared and sent via the U.S. Postal Service to men whose birth dates drew the lowest lottery numbers.

There are currently 23 countries in the world with mandatory military service of some sort, including Russia, Isreal, and Mexico. Among these countries, service by lottery is the exception rather than the rule.

Odds: based on 27 million eligible draftees and about 500,000 soldiers actually drafted, around 14-percent. That is very, very crude.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.