"The Most Honest Injustice"
The handwriting was his usual: sharp, angular, efficient.
The title was underlined twice, in pencil.
LOTTONOMICS (Alias' working notes)
"Lotteries are not games of chance, they are systems of allocation without mediation.
Their efficiency lies not in hope, but in their capacity to bypass negotiation, hierarchy, and bargaining.
They eliminate the costs of decision-making. No adjudicator, no appeals, no lobbying.
They unmask the farce of meritocracy."
Alias had double underlined that line.
"In a system where outcomes are allocated by random draw, the pretension that winners deserve their rewards collapses.
That is the hidden elegance of lotteries.
They make the arbitrariness of outcomes explicit, rather than dressing them in the theater of competence, hard work, or virtue.
Lotteries are the most honest system of injustice."
Ava paused.
She reread the line.
"The most honest system of injustice."
Alias didn’t romanticize the draw.
He saw it as the only allocation system that didn't insult intelligence by pretending to be fair while entrenching incumbents.
"Traditional economics treats lotteries as irrational behavior, anomalies in expected utility theory.
What they miss: the irrationality is structural, not behavioral. People gamble not out of stupidity, but because systems of reward are structurally closed to them.
Lotteries mimic access. They simulate openings in closed systems. That's their attraction, not only the payout.
Skewness preference: people prefer a near-zero chance at transformation over predictable small returns.
Pegged leverages this: the liquidity mechanism is a self-funding skewness machine, not a tax on hope, but a tax on the asymmetry of systems.
It is not a redistribution mechanism. It is a release valve for systems that otherwise calcify."
Ava frowned.
Alias wasn’t designing fairness. He wasn’t aiming for inclusion. He didn’t care about the people buying the tickets.
To him, lotteries were precision scalpels to cut through the tissue of managerial hypocrisy, to expose the lie that systems are ever about merit or rational reward.
His lottery wasn’t designed to comfort the underdog—it was designed to brutally expose the game for what it was.
Rigged. Arbitrary. Violent beneath the velvet.
"Economists whimper about lotteries being a tax on the poor. Of course it is. But that’s not a flaw.
It is the only tax the poor volunteer to pay. Not because they’re fooled. Because they know it’s the only game that doesn’t pretend to care about them.
There is no theater in the lottery. No moral dressing.
You pay for the ticket. You lose. You know the rules. You accept the outcome.
No bureaucrat will wag a finger at your 'financial illiteracy.'
No NGO will come knocking with pamphlets about 'responsible gambling.'
It's the last honest transaction left."
Ava shivered.
There it was, the cold heart of Alias's worldview.
He didn’t believe in fairness.
He believed in systems that stripped away the illusions people clung to.
No justice. No merit. No fairness.
Only the draw.
Only the random breath of chance.
Yet despite herself, she felt it—a grudging respect.
Alias’s clarity.
His refusal to sugarcoat.
His bitter honesty.
And maybe, just maybe, the sliver of something tender buried under all that cynicism: the desire to protect people from the even crueller lie that they lived in a world of just rewards.
