Lotto tickets not a better bet
The front page of the Dominion Post this morning featured a story about Lotto’s new tickets, suggesting that the move from the iconic yellow paper to new white tickets that look like supermarket receipts and fade in the sun may have been a bad one.
The Greens agree - but not just because the new tickets are confusing. In fact, Sue B broke the story about the new tickets not so long ago, but her main concern was that a local printing firm lost the contract to print the tickets, which are now being produced offshore.
Like Air New Zealand, Lotto is a New Zealand icon, and the Lotteries Commission, which markets itself as such and makes a show of supporting the community in other ways, should be doing everything it can to retain local jobs and boost the local economy. A thriving local economy presumably means more people buying lotto tickets after all.
But the decision was made to go offshore in search of the cheapest deal, and perhaps not surprisingly, it looks like they got a dud deal. Too bad.
April 5th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
Oh God, please don’t elevate a gambling scheme aimed at ripping off the poor to the status of “New Zealand icon”. Getting their tickets printed off-shore is the least of the ethical crimes committed by this institution.
April 6th, 2006 at 1:11 am
Perhaps the printing company should have applied for a lottery grant?
As I posted elsewhere - The main driver here is comparative advantage- the overseas company producing these tickets probably has a large enough factory to produce them in a fraction of the time and cost of the NZ factory, therefore the rational thing should be to produce them overseas and use the NZ resources for more profitable things in which NZ has a comparative advantage.
However this theory does break down when there is very little you have an advantage in without tariffs. Hence why NZ has a 50% agriculture-based economy, I suppose.
I would argue that SOME tariffs would be of benefit to the NZ economy. It is a shame how we have totally opened up our economy, removing all barriers to imports and wrecking local industries when our trading partners won’t do the same! Whether that would make any difference in this case is hard to tell, but this is part of the reason the current account deficit is so massive.
April 6th, 2006 at 10:22 am
Tariffs are a way of creating an artificial comprative advantage. Other ways of doing so include banning or restricting trade unions, keeping wages artificially low, providing cheap loans or government subsidies to business, undervaluing your currency, allowing lax safety standards and allowing costs to be externalised by tolerating environmental degradation.
If you want economic success in a free-market world, these are the things you should be doing.
China does this pretty well, and our government is trying to accelerate moves towards a free trade agreement. We seem to be cosying up to the sort of insane societies that we should be running screaming in the opposite direction from.
It all seems totally deranged to me, but then so do the whole workings of capitalism, and I’d have to admit I’m in a minority on this one, so perhaps there’s something I’m not getting.
April 6th, 2006 at 11:38 am
Sam Buchanan writes:
“It all seems totally deranged to me, but then so do the whole workings of capitalism, and I’d have to admit I’m in a minority on this one, so perhaps there’s something I’m not getting.”
Sam may be “in a minority on this one”, but with a lot of very good company!
Just looking at the history of “Money”
FROM: the original idea of a simple Token which could be re-exchanged for goods at a later date rather than having to always take the (often perishable) goods now …
TO: the current time when the Token has become THE all important entity in its own right: more important than food, than lives, than the enivironment, than the biosphere of the Planet …
The whole incredible saga points to a serious (and fatal) flaw in human thinking … We start off with a good idea and “make improvements”. The “improvements” become ends in themselves and we lose sight of “the big picture” and thus fail to see the idiocy of what we are doing. (Money is one example … Weapons and Warfare are another … )
As you say,”totally deranged”!
eredwen (who is similarly mystified and alarmed)
April 6th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
Lotto does a lot of donating to charities as well as giving out prizes to winners; hence, donations and winnings will increase if the costs decrease.
Anyway, if New Zealand is any good at producing Lotto tickets (or paper) then surely we shall increase our productivity to remain competitive – hopefully the company and personal tax rates might decrease to help…
The comments on other blogs about peak oil and transportation are semi-irrelevant to the topic; marine ‘bunker oil’ fuel is incredibly cheap and not likely to be short anytime soon. And how many million lotto tickets fit in a shipping container!? Even if the fuel price went up by 10x it would make virtually no difference per unit.
April 7th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
A thriving local economy means more Lotto tickets sold? Completely ignoring the mercantilist fallacies here, the sale of Lotto tickets would go down in a thriving economy - they’re more popular among the poor.
April 8th, 2006 at 7:32 am
Better odds of being struck by lightning. Better odds of getting wealthy in Las Vegas (or Lost Wages as the Angelinos say it).