Yet Another Reason to Not Play the Lottery

At least in Canada, that is. According to this CBC News report, clerks who sell lottery tickets are either really, really, really lucky or they steal winning tickets from their elderly customers. Who had the very clever thought of measuring the winning rate of lottery clerks? That would be Jeffrey Rosenthal, a statistician at the University of Toronto. I’ve read about Rosenthal a few times now, and am always impressed and intrigued by what he’s working on. This lottery story bears some obvious relation to the real-estate story we tell in Freakonomics. Maybe Rosenthal will turn out to be the Levitt of Canada.

(Thanks to Jeff Lewis for the tip.)