Forgive me, for those of you who play the lottery — but economists, at least among themselves, refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax, because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet.

Gilbert frames lottery play as a predictable error in everyday decision-making: people overweight tiny probabilities and focus on the vivid fantasy of winning while neglecting the negative expected value of the ticket. Calling it a “stupidity tax” emphasizes that the lottery functions like a voluntary levy paid disproportionately by those who misunderstand (or choose to ignore) the odds, transferring wealth to the state or operators. The deliberately crude comparison (“flushing…down the toilet”) is rhetorical shock: it collapses the gap between “spending” and “wasting” to highlight how little rational investment value a ticket has. The aside (“forgive me…”) acknowledges the social sensitivity of criticizing a common pastime.