Voltaire’s Luck | Hacker News Reader

Voltaire’s Luck

laphamsquarterly.org

99 pointspepys16 comments

Ethereum might have something to learn from the conclusion of the council which tried to establish illegality: no rules had been broken, the lottery was ill-devised. The winnings stand. Better luck next time.

Those who don't study Voltaire are condemned to repeat it:

https://slice.mit.edu/2012/08/14/winning-the-lottery/

I would not have guessed that the idiom "taken to the cleaners" dates back at least to early 18th century French.

Off-topic, and haven't read the article, but: oh my, what a marvelous site, and to think it's under a decade old. I've only skimmed a few of the articles, but this is an instant subscribe to print delivery for me. They must have a sizeable endowment or something to be so new and to still have print editions.

Lewis Lapham has a very successful career as a writer and editor behind him, and Lapham's Quarterly is basically his startup.

It's a wonderful publication; the print edition is pretty much the only magazine I've bothered to buy for the past few years. In my mind, it is exactly what periodicals should be about in the age of the internet: not instant news (for which the internet is a much better medium), but collections of essays/writings that won't expire.

Actually also the article is extremely well written, it was really a pleasure to stop a little to read it...

A lot of the more literary "news-magazines" have really kept the standard for editorial quality, whether publishing on the Internet or offline. The Paris Review, Lapham's Quarterly, Public Domain Review, etc are uniformly excellent -- and I only know of them because of HN.

I highly recommend subscribing. I have no connection to Lapham's Quarterly whatsoever. I am just a happy subscriber.

Each issue is themed. The article is from Summer 2016's LQ, with, as you'd suspect, the theme of "Luck". Each issue opens with a long essay/rumination from Lewis Lapham. He is a fabulous writer.

Then, you are given writings from throughout history, all centered around the theme. The presentation is lively and interesting. You might see a piece from a 17th century author juxtaposed with a photo from the 21st century. There will usually be some beautiful infographics related to the theme.

I generally read through each issue with my commonplace book at hand so I can transcribe interesting things I find within.

Lewis Lapham also edited Harper's, another terrific magazine, for a number of years.

Also off-topic but I decided to look up Mr. Lapham, who is 81 years old, and started clicking through the Wikipedia articles of his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great grandfather (in this order, below) - all of them prominent men.

____

- Lewis Abbot Lapham (1909 – 1995) was an American shipping and banking executive. Lapham worked as a journalist, columnist, and editor for the San Francisco Examiner for six years.

- Roger Dearborn Lapham (1883 – 1966) was a shipowner and businessman who served as the 32nd mayor of San Francisco from 1944 to 1948.

- Lewis Henry Lapham (1858 – 1934) was an American entrepreneur who made a fortune consolidating smaller business in the leather industry. He was also one of the founders of Texaco Oil Company. He was also actor Christopher Lloyd's maternal grandfather.

- Henry Griffith Lapham (1822 - 1888) I could only find the information in the image (http://i.imgur.com/WH2wd0m.png), but it seems to point to him also being successful in the leather business.

The quarterly is fantastic. Lapham was the former editor of Harper magazine. I was hooked when I first read this: http://laphamsquarterly.org/future/trust-issues - love at first sight.

Laphman has reminisced in a few of his essays about growing up in his august family in San Francisco - wonderful memories, windows into bygone eras. The pleasure of reading his essays, as for the magazine itself, lies in the prose itself even more than the ideas.

Someday I'll buy all the back issues.

The tl;dr is that Voltaire, in league with other influential folk, would buy all the tickets for various lotteries (at discounted prices), and therefore guarantee themselves a win. They did this over and over through the years, making themselves extremely rich.

Far less nefarious, but it reminds me of the guy that bought every jello pudding cup in town in order to accrue millions of frequent flier miles...

http://www.snopes.com/business/deals/pudding.asp

This tldr isn't very accurate. And the article isn't really that long. Worth the 20-something paragraphs of time.

But, to offer a slightly better summary:

Voltaire earned ~ half a million livres over about a year after discovering a broken lottery with a mathematician friend. The guy in charge of the lottery was fired, and the lottery was cancelled.

Voltaire used that money for additional investments, substantially increasing his wealth and allowing him to freely pursue his writing. The mathematician used his winnings to fund scientific research and expeditions.

Directly from the article: "As he later observed, “If you want to make a fortune in this country, it is enough to read the king’s orders-in-council.” In other words, if you want to get lucky, read the small print."

> a mathematician friend

Said mathematician was Charles Marie de La Condamine, maybe he isn't too well known abroad but the guy also discovered rubber (well, for the Occident of course, the natives knew it already), a malaria treatment, and measured the shape of the Earth (to confirm Newton's hypothesis that the poles would be flattened) in a great expedition to Peru.

So he's a reasonably important 18th century man who wasn't only a mathematician.

What was the brokenness? The article was written in a confusing fashion, skimming over bond discounts and pot sweeteners.

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