what-weve-lost-participating in-the-lottery
what-weve-lost-participating in-the-lottery
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t my community advantage shop, and Nearly absolutely at yours, also, it can be done to purchase upward of fifty unique types of scratch-off lottery tickets. To do so, you must be not less than eighteen a long time old, Although the tickets look like the décor to get a kindergarten classroom. The dominant themes are Major shades, dollar indicators, and glossy, as in gold bars, shooting stars, glinting horseshoes, and stacks of silver coins. If you find yourself considering a strong wall of these, Additionally they resemble—based upon the palette, font selections, and standard flashy hecticness—the mid-nineties Net. Some of them are named for other online games, including the Monopoly X5, the Double Blackjack, as well as the Loved ones Feud, but most are easy about the point of buying them: Show Me $ten,000!, $100,000 Blessed, Cash Explosion, Hard cash Is King, Blazing Very hot Dollars, Huge Money Riches. If the style runs towards Rapidly Ca£h or Red Ball Cash Doubler, You should purchase just one for just a buck; if you favor VIP Club or $2,000,000 Gold Hurry, one ticket will set you back 30 dollars. All of this is before you decide to get towards the Pick three, Pick four, Powerball, and Mega Hundreds of thousands tickets, that are comparatively staid in appearance—they appear like Scantron sheets—and they are printed out at the time of acquire.
The strangest of the various Unusual factors about these tickets is that, as opposed to other benefit-keep staples—Utz potato chips, Entenmann’s cinnamon-swirl buns, $1.98 bottles of wine—They can be introduced for you by your condition governing administration. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah are not in the business of marketing lottery tickets. In all places else, Blazing Warm Funds and its ilk are, like state parks and driver’s licenses, a govt assistance.
How this arrived to get is the subject of a fantastic new guide, “For your Dollar plus a Desire: Point out Lotteries in Modern day The usa,” via the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the guts of Cohen’s guide is actually a peculiar contradiction: about the just one hand, the lottery is vastly less lucrative than its proponents allow it to be out to be, a deception which includes appear on the expense of community coffers and public providers. Conversely, it is so popular that it is both exceptionally rewarding with the private organizations which make and promote tickets and fiscally crippling for its most committed gamers. A single in two American adults purchases a lottery ticket at least once a year, one in four buys one a minimum of at the time per month, and quite possibly the most avid gamers purchase them at premiums that might shock you. At my regional store, some buyers snap up overall rolls—in a minimum, three hundred pounds’ well worth of tickets—and Some others show up each morning, Perform until they earn a thing, then come back in the evening and do it once more. All this, repeated every single day at grocery outlets and liquor suppliers and mini-marts across the nation, renders the lottery a ninety-one particular-billion-dollar business enterprise. “People expend far more on lottery tickets each year than on cigarettes, coffee, or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “they usually spend more on lottery tickets yearly than on video streaming companies, live performance tickets, guides, and Motion picture tickets combined.”
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As those two sets of comparisons advise, lottery tickets can seem to be possibly a benign kind of entertainment or a dangerous dependancy. The dilemma that lurks in just “For the Greenback in addition to a Desire” is which category they actually belong to—and, accordingly, regardless of whether governments billed with advertising the final welfare ought to be during the organization of manufacturing them, publicizing them, and profiting from them.
Lotteries are an historical pastime. They have been widespread inside the Roman Empire—Nero was a enthusiast of them; make of that what you can—and therefore are attested to through the entire Bible, wherever the casting of a lot is useful for every thing from picking the subsequent king of Israel to picking who will get to maintain Jesus’ clothes after the Crucifixion. In lots of of those early occasions, they ended up deployed either for a style of bash game—in the course of Roman Saturnalias, tickets had been dispersed absolutely free to visitors, many of whom gained extravagant prizes—or as a method of divining God’s will. Usually, nevertheless, lotteries had been structured to raise dollars for general public functions. The earliest regarded version of keno dates on the Han dynasty and is alleged to obtain helped buy the Great Wall of China. Two hundreds of years afterwards, Caesar Augustus begun a lottery to subsidize repairs for town of Rome.
By the fourteen-hundreds, the apply was frequent inside the Lower Nations around the world, which relied on lotteries to develop city fortifications and, later, to offer charity with the poor. Quickly ample, the trend manufactured its method to England, wherever, in 1567, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the country’s initially lottery, designating its revenue for “reparation on the Havens and strength on the Realme.” Tickets cost 10 shillings, a significant sum back then, and, As well as the opportunity prize value, every one served being a get-out-of-jail-totally free card, pretty much; just about every lottery participant was entitled to immunity from arrest, except for particular felonies for instance piracy, murder, and treason.
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The lottery didn't a great deal spread to America from England as assistance unfold England into The us: the eu settlement from the continent was financed partly via lotteries. They then turned typical during the colonies on their own, Regardless of solid Protestant proscriptions towards gambling. From the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which held its initial authorized lottery in 1745, dice and actively playing playing cards were forbidden even in private properties.
That contradiction is often explained in part by exigency; no matter what its moral bent, early The united states was quick on revenue and lengthy on the necessity for general public will work. Eventually, it also turned, as Cohen notes, “defined politically by its aversion to taxation.” That made the lottery an appealing choice for elevating funds, which was utilized for funding every thing from civil defense to the construction of churches. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton ended up all financed partly by lotteries, and also the Continental Congress tried to implement 1 to help you purchase the Groundbreaking War. (Lotteries fashioned a exceptional level of agreement concerning Thomas Jefferson, who regarded them as not Substantially riskier than farming, and Alexander Hamilton, who grasped what would turn into their essence: that everybody “would prefer a small potential for successful an incredible offer to an excellent prospect of successful little.”) And, like Practically every thing else in early The united states, lotteries ended up twisted up With all the slave trade, occasionally in unpredictable means. George Washington after managed a Virginia-primarily based lottery whose prizes bundled human beings, and one previously enslaved guy, Denmark Vesey, obtained his independence soon after winning a South Carolina lottery and went on to foment a slave rebellion.
This Preliminary period of the American lottery was introduced to an close by common worry about mismanagement and malfeasance. Between 1833 and 1880, each condition but one banned the apply, leaving only the infamously corrupt Louisiana State Lottery Enterprise in Procedure. Regardless of its identify, the L.S.L.C. correctly operated across the country, sending advertisements and offering tickets by mail. So effective was it that, as Cohen describes, it took the federal government to eliminate it off; in 1890, Congress passed a legislation prohibiting the interstate promotion or sale of lottery tickets, therefore devastating the Louisiana activity and, In the meanwhile, Placing a quit to condition lotteries in America.
Predictably, while in the absence of lawful lotteries, unlawful kinds flourished—previously mentioned all, figures video games, which awarded day-to-day prizes for appropriately guessing A 3-digit amount. To prevent allegations that the sport was fixed, every day’s winning number was based on a publicly offered but consistently transforming supply, like the amount of cash traded on the Ny Inventory Exchange. Figures games had been enormously well-liked everywhere you go—in 1964, they raked in two hundred million bucks, about two billion in today’s dollars, in Ny city alone—but In particular so in Black communities, where they furnished a Significantly wanted supply of revenue. This was legitimate typically for his or her organizers and runners, whose ranks included Ella Fitzgerald and Malcolm X, but sometimes also for players who lucked into a windfall, for instance Luther Theophilus Powell, who won ten thousand dollars on a twenty-5 greenback wager in the nineteen-fifties and used it to buy a home in Queens for his spouse, daughter, and youthful son, Colin Powell.
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Sooner or later, figures video games proved so profitable they were taken over by arranged criminal offense, often While using the help of law enforcement officers who approved bribes to shut down African American operators. Dutch Schultz and Vito Genovese both equally applied the game that will help bankroll their functions, and also the Winter Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger’s crew, got its commence partly by functioning figures in Somerville, outside the house Boston. With the nineteen-fifties, escalating problem about the energy and access in the Mob culminated inside of a Senate investigation, the Kefauver committee, which judged profits from gambling to generally be the first monetary engine of crime syndicates in the united states. This declaration, and also the torrent of reports protection it created, experienced a paradoxical result: it created lottery game titles appear so rewarding that, after decades of dismissing them as inappropriate for your honorable enterprise of community provider, state governments once again commenced to contemplate getting in about the get.
It is at this stage that Cohen’s narrative definitely will get going; Whilst he nods for the early background from the lottery, he focusses chiefly on its contemporary incarnation. This commenced, he argues, when developing consciousness about all The cash to be designed in the gambling organization collided using a crisis in point out funding. During the nineteen-sixties, under the load of a swelling populace, soaring inflation, and the price of the Vietnam War, The usa’s prosperity started to wane. For most states, especially people who offered a generous social security Web, balancing the price range became increasingly difficult with no both increasing taxes or reducing companies. The difficulty was that both solutions have been very unpopular with voters.
For politicians confronting this problem, the lottery appeared to be a wonderful Option: a method to take care of existing expert services without the need of hiking taxes—and therefore without having having punished with the polls. For them, Cohen writes, lotteries had been essentially “budgetary miracles, the chance for states to make revenue look seemingly out of slender air.” For example, in New Jersey, which experienced no sales tax, no profits tax, and no urge for food for instituting either a single, legislators claimed that a lottery would usher in many an incredible number of bucks, therefore relieving them of the necessity to at any time all over again ponder the unpleasant subject matter of taxation.
Dismissing lengthy-standing moral objections on the lottery, these new advocates reasoned that, considering the fact that folks have been gonna gamble anyway, the condition may possibly also pocket the gains. That argument had its limits—by its logic, governments must also promote heroin—however it gave ethical include to those who authorized of lotteries for other explanations. A lot of white voters, Cohen writes, supported legalization since they imagined condition-run gambling would principally entice Black numbers gamers, who'd then foot the Invoice for expert services that those white voters didn’t choose to buy anyway, including much better colleges from the urban locations that they had recently fled. (In reality, the oft-repeated assert that legalizing the lottery would merely decriminalize latest gamblers as an alternative to produce new types of all races proved dramatically Erroneous.) In the meantime, several African American voters supported legalization because they believed that it could ease their friction Using the police, for whom numbers game titles had prolonged served to be a explanation—at times legitimate, occasionally not—to interrogate and imprison men and women of coloration.
Lottery opponents, nonetheless, questioned the two the ethics of funding public solutions as a result of gambling and also the amount of cash that states actually stood to gain. Such critics hailed from either side in the political aisle and all walks of lifetime, but essentially the most vociferous of them were devout Protestants, who regarded authorities-sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable. (Catholics, In contrast, ended up overwhelmingly Professional-lottery, played it in massive quantities as soon as it had been legalized, and reliably flocked to other gambling video games likewise; Cohen cites the staggering proven fact that, in 1978, “bingo video games hosted by Ohio Catholic higher universities took in extra money than the point out’s lottery.”) As one particular Methodist minister and anti-lottery activist declared at the time, “There's far more agreement amongst Protestant teams within the adverse outcome of gambling than on another social difficulty, such as the issues of abortion, Liquor, and homosexuality.” These adverse results involved fostering gambling addictions, sapping revenue from the lousy, undermining fundamental civic and moral ideals by championing a route to prosperity that did not include merit or hard work, and encouraging state governments To optimize gains even within the expenditure in their most susceptible citizens.
However legitimate these concerns might have been, they had been largely disregarded. In 1964, New Hampshire, famously tax averse, permitted the primary state-operate lottery of the trendy era. 13 states adopted in as many years, all of them during the Northeast as well as the Rust Belt. Meanwhile, as Cohen recounts, the nation’s late-twentieth-century tax revolt intensified. In 1978, California passed Proposition 13, chopping home taxes by Just about sixty for every cent and inspiring other states to follow fit; inside the early nineteen-eighties, with Ronald Reagan while in the White Household, federal revenue flowing into state coffers declined. With A lot more states casting all-around for methods for their budgetary crises which would not enrage an progressively anti-tax electorate, the enchantment from the lottery spread south and west.
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As Cohen relates in perhaps the most fascinating chapter of his guide, Those people Professional-lottery forces had a robust ally in Scientific Games, Inc., a lottery-ticket manufacturer that 1st built a reputation for by itself by pioneering scratch-off tickets. Besides delivering prompt final results, these tickets, like Ikea household furniture, offer you the charm of active participation, which supplies players the illusion of training some Handle around the outcome. Scratch-off tickets débuted to wonderful success in Massachusetts in 1974; by 1976, just about every point out lottery experienced jumped around the bandwagon. But that triumph offered a difficulty for Scientific Online games, because it intended the readily available market was saturated. To maintain growing its business, the company established about persuading extra states to legalize the lottery. Setting up from the late seventies, S.G.I. started employing lobbyists, contracting with advertising companies, making astroturf citizens’ teams, and paying millions of bucks to influence voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, plus the District of Columbia to pass lottery initiatives.
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Scientific Online games wasn't the only firm providing lottery companies, but its competition experienced mainly eschewed lobbying, nominally out of ethical issues but actually mainly because they were unwilling to invest revenue which they wouldn’t recoup should they didn’t land the ensuing contracts. S.G.I. obtained all around this issues by ensuring that the lottery initiatives it backed contained language—allegedly meant to avert the involvement of organized criminal offense—that essential substantial monetary disclosures don't just from every one of the executives at organizations publishing a bid but from each of the executives at their dad or mum organizations, much too. That requirement by yourself built the bidding procedure much too burdensome to be worthwhile for S.G.I.’s chief competitor, Webcraft Video games, since it was owned by Beatrice Foods, which at time was much larger than Lockheed Martin, 3M, and Coca-Cola. The S.G.I.-supported initiatives also mandated limited timelines for that bidding method, offering the corporation a organizing edge while rendering it pretty much difficult for any person else to finish the paperwork in time.
However dodgy this method might happen to be, it labored. Every single lottery initiative backed by S.G.I. succeeded—and, in each circumstance, the organization was rewarded that has a contract. That meant its lobbying investment paid off, spectacularly; in California, For illustration, S.G.I. spent $2.4 million to pass a lottery initiative, then gained the resulting forty-million-dollar agreement. Wins like that quickly turned Scientific Video games into an unstoppable power inside the lottery sector. By 1982, the corporate had printed its five-billionth ticket and was creating one million a lot more each individual hour. At the same time, the lottery marketplace by itself experienced develop into unstoppable, far too—because of S.G.I. and also the wave of legalizations, but also because of the introduction of the new edition of an exceedingly previous activity of likelihood that, as Cohen writes, “essentially reshaped the spot of lotteries in American Modern society.”
According to a betting match at first performed in seventeenth-century Genoa, lotto is not self-evidently groundbreaking—or, for that matter, self-evidently interesting. To Enjoy, you guess a specific quantity of figures from a specified assortment. The Ny Lotto, As an illustration, involves six numbers in between 1 and fifty-9; the North Carolina lotto, 5 quantities between one and forty-three. The percentages of receiving each of the quantities appropriate are absurdly reduced—which, paradoxically, is why lotto revolutionized the field.
Prior to the activity was released, point out jackpots were fairly modest. Their measurement was restricted by the number of players, considering the fact that payouts reflected a percentage of ticket income, and by point out lottery commissions, which established a cap on the prize cash; from 1964 to 1979, jackpots seldom exceeded one million dollars. But lotto was a rollover video game: if a drawing was held and nobody gained—a common occurrence, given the percentages—gamers could hold obtaining tickets. For all those profiting in the lottery, this created a virtuous cycle. Each time the pot received even bigger, more people were being tempted to get a ticket, plus the more and more people bought tickets, the bigger the pot turned.
The entire issue was hugely counterintuitive—the worse the percentages of profitable turned, the more people desired to Engage in. Alexander Hamilton was proper: to the average individual, the distinction between a person-in-three-million odds and a single-in-3-hundred-million odds didn’t subject, but the distinction between A 3-million-greenback jackpot and a three-hundred-million-dollar jackpot mattered enormously. Recognizing this, lottery commissioners commenced lifting prize caps and introducing extra quantities—say, six outside of fifty as opposed to five out of 30—As a result earning the chance of winning even lesser. The The big apple Lotto launched, in 1978, with just one-in-3.eight-million odds; right now, the percentages are just one in forty-five million.
Irrespective of All of this, and to the despair of statisticians all over the place, lotto quickly grew to become the country’s most popular lottery recreation. But While ticket sales and prize winnings soared, they did not do so equally across the country, given that rollover jackpots disproportionately benefitted states with massive populations and for that reason additional probable players. In response, smaller states banded together to variety multistate lotteries, a craze that culminated in Powerball and Mega Thousands and thousands, Each and every of which started to be a collaboration amid A few states but is currently performed just about everywhere the lottery is lawful. The resulting prizes are actually astronomical; this earlier July, two those who acquired a lottery ticket in Illinois bucked one-in-three-hundred-and-two-million odds to acquire a $one.34-billion Mega Tens of millions jackpot.
In certain respects, the fashionable American lotto video game is an item of technological improve; it couldn't have existed ahead of Pc plans that enabled states to find out roughly instantaneously no matter whether any individual had purchased a ticket with the profitable numbers. But Cohen tends to make a persuasive circumstance that it was also an item of cultural modify: the top of a shared reverence for Center-course balance and the rise, during the nineteen-eighties, on the veneration of extravagant prosperity. The many years where lotto reshaped the countrywide gambling scene had been the several years of deregulation and Reaganomics, Donald J. Trump and Alex P. Keaton, the première of “Existence of the Wealthy and Renowned” and also a remake of “Brewster’s Tens of millions.” Pastors were being preaching the prosperity gospel; politicians were singing the praises of the unfettered totally free marketplace. All of a sudden, Cohen writes, “it had been not taboo to gather a huge fortune; neither was it offensive to point out it off. Prosperity—not the prosperity of blue-collar employees though the fortunes in their bosses—turned a method of reasserting the bounty of capitalism.”
The irony, as Cohen notes, is this obsession with unimaginable prosperity, such as the dream of hitting a multimillion-greenback lottery jackpot, corresponded into a decline in financial safety for many Doing work people. Starting from the nineteen-seventies and accelerating inside the nineteen-eighties, the earnings hole among the rich along with the poor widened, occupation safety and pensions eroded, overall health-care charges and unemployment rose, and, for kids born in People a long time, our extended-standing national promise—that training and labor would render them far better off than their mom and dad—ceased being genuine. Daily life, because it turned out, imitated the lottery: for many Us citizens, it absolutely was acquiring more difficult and harder to acquire.
The lottery was supposed to make all this much better, not worse. Its advocates claimed that, by filling condition coffers devoid of increasing state taxes, it would maintain funds inside the pockets of common citizens. But this premise, which led state following point out to approve lotteries, was simply just untrue. Proof from the primary legalized lotteries swiftly set paid out towards the fantasy which they would provide ample cash flow to fund much with the enterprise of running a state. In New Jersey, wherever proponents had imagined proceeds about the get of a huge selection of a lot of pounds, the lottery introduced in 30-a few million pounds in its first yr—about two for each cent on the condition’s income.
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When figures like that proved common of the period, legalization advocates, not in a position to sell the lottery to be a statewide silver bullet, ginned up other approaches alternatively, frequently with the assistance of Scientific Games. Rather then argue that a lottery would float almost all of a point out’s price range, they started claiming that it might deal with a single line item, invariably a federal government assistance which was well known and nonpartisan—most frequently instruction, but sometimes elder treatment or general public parks or assist for veterans. Just one virtue of this narrower approach was that it made campaigning for legalization easy. A vote with the lottery was not a method of supporting gambling but a way of supporting veterans; a vote from the lottery was a vote in opposition to education.
These strategiesตรวจ รางวัล have been extraordinarily successful but, as with the sooner types, fundamentally deceptive. For something, they, as well, wildly inflated the impact of lottery revenue on condition funds. In California, wherever an S.G.I.-backed lottery initiative passed after a high-profile marketing campaign touted it like a boon for schoolchildren, the ensuing earnings covered, while in the lottery’s very first calendar year, about five for each cent from the state instruction finances. As of the calendar year, based on the California Office of Instruction, lottery profits accounts for roughly one particular for each cent of all K-twelve funding.
But that was not the worst of it. Again and again, education and learning together with other line products that served to persuade men and women to pass lottery proposals didn't in fact get any supplemental funding; as a substitute, the earnings went into your condition’s common fund. Immediately after this happened in California, other states mandated that lottery funds move directly into specified plans, but, as is so frequently the situation, when 1 loophole closes, An additional 1 opens. In Illinois, Florida, and Virginia, amid other states, the lottery earnings did without a doubt go to a specified training fund—whereupon legislators offset All those gains by lessening The cash coming in from typical appropriations. In the end, Cohen writes, “the lottery supplanted, as an alternative to supplemented, condition investing on training.”
Today, in accordance with the Nationwide Conference of Condition Legislatures, lotteries bring in, on normal, about one particular per cent of condition revenue every year. Like all funds, it issues, but what ever change it helps make is offset by two complications. The initial is usually that lotteries have produced it more difficult than previously to go A lot essential tax boosts, because, thanks to many years of noisy campaigning followed by many years of major advertising, the public wrongly believes that colleges along with other important solutions are lavishly supported by gambling resources. The second would be that the funds lifted by lotteries comes mostly in the individuals that can minimum afford to pay for to element with it. Each individual state lottery is regressive, that means that it takes a disproportionate toll on minimal-profits citizens. Loaded individuals do Perform the lottery, not surprisingly; amongst the most important-at any time Powerball jackpots, a quarter of a billion dollars, was received by a few asset supervisors from Greenwich, Connecticut. But the wealthy purchase fewer tickets than the poor (apart from when jackpots technique ten figures); because of that and since their purchases represent a A lot lesser proportion in their earnings, participating in the lottery includes a considerably smaller sized effect on their pocketbooks. The difference could be drastic: based on the purchaser monetary firm Bankrate, gamers building much more than fifty thousand pounds per year spend, on typical, 1 per cent in their once-a-year cash flow on lottery tickets; People producing under 30 thousand bucks invest 13 for each cent. That means another person producing 20-seven thousand dollars loses some thirty-5 hundred pounds into the lottery every year. To place that range in context, just about sixty for each cent of american citizens have lower than a thousand pounds in price savings.
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Defenders from the lottery sometimes Forged it like a tax on the stupid, meaning both that gamers don’t understand how unlikely they are to earn or which they enjoy the video game in any case. This suggests that lottery paying out is a completely individual in lieu of a partly structural decision, but In fact it truly is aware of financial fluctuation; as Cohen writes, “Lottery profits maximize as incomes tumble, unemployment grows, and poverty premiums increase.” As with all commercial goods, lottery revenue also increase with publicity to advertising and marketing—and lottery merchandise are most greatly promoted in neighborhoods which can be disproportionately poor, Black, or Latino. In Texas, where by the bare minimum wage is $seven.25, You should purchase a fifty-dollar scratch-off ticket at a Look at-cashing venue or get Powerball and Mega Millions tickets, like Snickers bars, even though purchasing groceries in a Dollar Basic. Nor are point out lottery commissions earlier mentioned availing by themselves from the psychology of addiction. Every thing regarding the lottery—from advert strategies for the appear of your front of your tickets and The maths powering them—is built to hold gamers coming back For additional. None of the is particularly diverse through the methods of tobacco providers or video-recreation brands. It just isn’t Usually completed beneath the auspices of The federal government.
In the ultimate web pages of “For just a Greenback in addition to a Desire,” Cohen, a good and meticulous collector of knowledge, lastly puts his thumb on the scale. Contemplating the regressive nature of point out lotteries, their predatory techniques, their position in fostering gambling addictions, the way in which they discourage regular taxation, and their rather modest economical contributions, he concludes which they “mustn't exist in the modern United states of america.” As he acknowledges, this recommendation is not going to get taken anytime quickly; no condition has repealed its lottery in greater than a hundred and twenty-5 years. Continue to, he argues, we should perform toward frequent-feeling reforms, for instance banning the sale of tickets on line, capping the expense of scratch-off tickets and the dimensions of lotto jackpots, and, Probably most vital, closing a loophole that leaves lotteries exempt from F.T.C. regulation, and thus free from the constraints of truth of the matter-in-promotion legislation.
What would take place if state lotteries waned in affect or vanished altogether? Cohen absolutely overreaches when he claims that, “devoid of such a blinding beacon, far more Americans could possibly be willing to think critically about the economic forces that have degraded use of social mobility and possess produced it tougher for individuals to achieve financial stability.” But he is true that governments in a very democratic Culture must be inside the enterprise of enhancing the percentages, not rigging the game, and there are way more equitable and successful means to the point out to work with its mighty powers to improve daily life for its citizens. As the California Lottery put it in a very 2013 advertising campaign, “Believe in anything more substantial.” ♦