YC’s Vice Lotteries challenges state lotteries

Practices that harm, mislead the public must change

State lotteries are a $75 billion industry that generates profits through the misfortune of its participants. Because these lotteries target lower-income people with deceptive advertising that promises pots of gold, trees blooming with cash, and similar messages that cast their games as an escape from poverty, the losing-proposition properties of these games contribute to the nation’s wealth divide.

Y Combinator-backed Vice Lotteries seeks to disrupt these state monopolies that take advantage of people’s hopes and dreams. This is not a suggestion to adopt a prohibition on gambling, but rather to restore states to their roles as business regulators, rather than lottery purveyors.

Vice Lotteries proposes a system of “equitable gambling” — meaning that every dollar wagered will be returned as prize money, rather than being taken out of the communities where it was originally earned — that would help keep money in those communities where it is desperately needed, help reduce wealth disparity, and yet provide people who want to try their luck with the ability to do so with an understanding of how their decisions are likely to affect their wealth and with algorithms to ensure that nobody gets in too deep through their wagering. In effect, the idea is to keep lotteries … just fun.

About Vice Lotteries:

Vice Lotteries seeks to reverse income inequality by building tools to develop financial responsibility and literacy. Starting by taking loss out of lotteries, Vice Lotteries will provide gamblers with transparent, statistical data for informed wagering and saving with knowledge of the effects their decisions can be expected to have on their personal wealth.

SOURCE Vice Lotteries