the lottery's biggest winners

No, it's not the winners of the $300+ million jackpot who draw the lion's share of the lottery's wealth.

Enveloped in neon lights, murmuring crowds and the tinny melody of computerized games, a convention center showroom here bears the trappings of a Las Vegas casino. But the players, mostly state employees sporting suits and name tags, haven’t come to this annual expo to gamble. Instead, they are sampling the wares of one of government’s biggest cash cows: lotteries, which rang up about $202 billion in sales last year in the United States and overseas.

Amid sales pitches and glad-handing, there’s also no mistaking which two companies dominate the landscape of government-backed gambling. Commanding the showroom’s entrance, with a booth mocked up as a convenience store featuring a Mega Bucks ticket dispenser, is the Scientific Games Corporation. Dominating the center of the hall, beneath a twirling orange and blue globe, is Gtech Holdings, its vaunted sales team strolling through a labyrinth of gleaming lottery terminals.

“You can pretty much look at the size of the booths as a guide to which companies have the most muscle in the industry,” says David Gale, executive director of the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, a sponsor of the event, called World Meet. “As you can see, nobody even comes close to Gtech and Scientific Games.”

Over the last three decades, Gtech and Scientific Games have jointly generated several billion dollars in revenue as vendors to lotteries — a business that flourishes at the crossroads of capitalism and public policy. In the process, the companies have steadily — and often controversially — evolved from minor suppliers into an influential oligopoly with a hammerlock on lottery operations.

Every business has its titans, of course. But according to analysts, lottery officials and public documents, Gtech and Scientific Games have done more than just ride the gambling boom — they have strong-armed their way to the top of a publicly sponsored industry that they now dominate. And with the domestic lottery market plateauing, both companies are focused on securing new footholds overseas.

"Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing from something."

Alan Wolfe, in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, writes this about gambling (and what we should know):

Not that long ago, legal gambling was confined to one state, Nevada, which, along the way, had developed a reputation as the place to get divorced or buy sex; things forbidden everywhere else were permitted there. We usually think of taboos as deeply entrenched, separating the dirty from the clean, yet not only are Las Vegas and other Nevada cities now among the fastest growing in the United States, but the industry associated with their once unseemly nightlife is featured on more cable-television stations than one can count.

Gambling, moreover, has taken root in a country with a Puritan background that is to this day marked by public religiosity. Once upon a time, religious figures were second to none in their condemnation of gambling: Billy Sunday, the prototypical right-wing revivalist, denounced it in his sermons in the early 20th century, while Walter Rauschenbusch, the left-wing founder of the Social Gospel, called it "the vice of the savage." Yet in contemporary America, not only are religious figures generally quiet on the issue, but some of them, like the The Book of Virtues author William J. Bennett, have themselves been gamblers, while others — one thinks of Ralph Reed, the former executive director of the Christian Coalition — have been implicated in efforts to charge Indian tribes exorbitant fees for lobbying on behalf of the American Indian gaming industry.

It would be relatively easy to conclude that gambling has become so prominent in American life because we have become a hedonistic country in which anything goes. But as the Rev. Richard McGowan, a Jesuit priest and gambling expert at Boston College, reminded me, 30 years ago gambling was considered a sin while smoking was fashionable, whereas today the reverse is true. We continue to be deeply puritanical in some aspects of our culture while decidedly libertarian in others; at a time when we see debates about hate speech, witness campaigns by feminists against pornography, and hear politicians speak about zero tolerance for under-age drinking or sexual misconduct, gambling is on the rise. It resonates with the permissive rather than the prohibitive side of our culture.

The title quote is attributed to Wilson Mizner.