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Good_Burning_Plastic comments on Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015 - Less Wrong
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Yup, he appears to be doing that. On the grounds that he has other reasons for thinking they don't deserve credit for it.
Rather than commenting on the credibility of that in Elster's specific case (which would depend on knowing more than I do about Elster and about the anti-communists he paid attention to), I'll remark that there certainly are cases in which most of us here would do likewise. (Not literally zero credit, but extremely little, which I think is also what Elster's doing.) For instance:
One of your friends is an avid lottery enthusiast and keeps urging you to buy a ticket "because today might be your lucky day". He disdains your statements that buying lottery tickets is a substantial loss on average and insists that he's made a profit from playing the lottery. (Maybe he actually has, maybe not.) Eventually you give in and buy one ticket. It happens to win a large prize.
Another of your friends is a fundamentalist of some sort and tells you confidently that the current scientific consensus on evolution is all bunk. Any time she reads of any scientific claim about evolution she is liable to tell you confidently that in time it'll be refuted by later research. One day, a new discovery is made that refutes something you had said to her about evolution (e.g., that X is more closely related to Y than to Z).
Another worships the ancient Roman gods and tells you with great confidence that it will rain tomorrow because he has made sacrifice to Jupiter, Neptune and the lares and penates of his household. You are expecting a dry day because that's what the weather forecasts say. It does in fact rain a bit.
Substantial? The tickets of all lotteries I'm familiar with cost less than a movie ticket.
Yes. Households earning less than $13,000 a year spend a shocking 9% of their money on lottery tickets.
Someone else follows the citation trail and claims the source thinks the actual number is lower:
$300/year (unless someone is a bored millionaire) is still shocking to me.
Assume a flat distribution from 0 to 10000 and it's $150 a year, or about a lottery ticket and a half per week at $2 a ticket. Not too unreasonable. But on the other hand, you've got to figure lottery spending's unevenly distributed, probably following something along the lines of the 80/20 rule, and that brings us back to a ticket a day or higher.
Seems plenty unreasonable to me. If your income is somewhere on "a flat distribution from 0 to $10000" then you are probably just barely getting by, and perpetually one minor financial difficulty away from disaster. If you were able to save $150/year, that could make a really substantial difference to your financial resilience.
(Though I don't much like pronouncing from my quite comfortable position on how those in poverty should spend their money. It's liable to sound like a claim of superiority, but in fact I do plenty of stupid and counterproductive things and it's entirely possible that if I were suddenly thrown into poverty I'd manage much worse than those people; I doubt I'd be buying lottery tickets, but I'd probably be making other mistakes that they don't.)
[EDITED to fix a bit of incredibly clunky writing style.]
It still break my formerly favourite analogy, movie tickets -- I don't think the average household making <$10k/year spends $150/year on movie tickets. (Some such households probably do, but I strongly doubt the average one does.)
But more on booze, probably, otherwise how could they bear it.
A family of four can probably blow $50 seeing one movie.
Upvoted for checking claims :-)
The link actually says that he cannot find the original source for the 9% number, but in the process found a 3% number.
I'll dig around for better numbers if I have time, but we can also look at significance from the other end:
(Wikipedia)
P.S. An interesting paper. Notable quotes:
And also
Okay, now I can see where all the people giving financial reasons why lotteries are bad are coming from.
Substantial as a fraction of what you spend on lottery tickets. Obviously if you don't spend much you can't lose much.