The Norm Chronicles (20 page)

That’s the problem with this idea: massive payouts attract vast ticket sales, increasing the chance of having to share the big money. Take the US Mega-millions $1 lottery: in March 2012 the pre-tax jackpot stood at $656 million, although there were only 176 million possible tickets. In the end there were three jackpot winners – it would have been a high-risk gamble to try and buy all the tickets.

But even if a loss is made, lotteries present an obvious opportunity for money-laundering, and the World Lottery Association even produces a guide on how operators can guard against this.
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If you want to have the best betting odds, then visit one of the 150 or so casinos in the UK. You will still probably lose, but a European roulette table has only one zero, when the bank takes all the bets (an American table has two zeros), giving the house a small edge of 2.7 per cent, meaning the casino returns on average 97.3 per cent of money staked on roulette. This compares to the 45 per cent return of the National Lottery, which doesn’t sound great but is better than other lotteries.

Betting on horse-racing and other sports is still a mainstay of the 8,000 or so betting shops in the UK, which operate at around a 88 per cent payout, although Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBTs) playing roulette at a 97.3 per cent payout are now more popular than the racing and are increasingly accused of encouraging problem gambling. FOBTs have a high payout, but the playing is so rapid and compulsive (DS can vouch for this) that they are staggeringly profitable – UK betting shops
are only allowed four per shop, so outlets are proliferating in High Streets just to house the FOBTs. But these don’t have the drama of an accumulator bet, in which a small initial stake accumulates over a whole series of connected bets provided they are all successful, such as picking 19 correct football results in a row and winning £585,000 for an initial 86p stake.
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Gambling is increasingly becoming a private activity conducted at home on the Internet – in 2008 5.6 per cent (1 in 18) of the adult population played online (non-lottery) games. These websites may provide a link, hidden at the bottom of the page, to Gamble Aware and Gamblers Anonymous, but problem gambling is estimated to afflict around 1 or 3 per cent of adults, depending on who you listen to. ‘Pathological gambling’ has been considered a psychiatric disorder for many years, with an official diagnosis if you are someone who ticks at least 5 of the following boxes:
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• is preoccupied with gambling (e.g., preoccupied with reliving past gambling experiences, handicapping or planning the next venture, or thinking of ways to get money with which to gamble)

• needs to gamble with increasing amounts of money in order to achieve the desired excitement

• has repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop gambling

• is restless or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop gambling

• gambles as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood (e.g., feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression)

• after losing money gambling, often returns another day to get even (‘chasing’ one’s losses)

• lies to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with gambling

• has committed illegal acts such as forgery, fraud, theft or embezzlement to finance gambling

• has jeopardised or lost a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of gambling

• relies on others to provide money to relieve a desperate financial situation caused by gambling

These terse statements cover a pile of misery. So why do people continue to gamble in games of pure chance, when they know the house wins on average? The problem is that, although we may rationally know it’s all just chance, and nothing we can know or do can affect the odds, we still tend to think that a good result is ‘due’, or that really we have some control over what happens, and that ‘near-misses’ are as important as they (truly) are in games of skill such as football.

There is only one NHS clinic for problem gambling, appropriately situated in Soho.
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Soon problem gambling will be officially considered an addiction, similar to drink or drugs. And if such behaviour is to be medically labelled as an addiction, what next? Obsessive shopping?

But do people really gamble as a rational substitution for buying a pension? If they do, they are truly irrational. But if we are not doing it as an investment strategy, and we don’t wreck our health and family, perhaps it’s not such a bad thing. In that case, gambling can be, well, fun.

So let’s say you wanted to have some, and fancied a £100,000 Maserati, like Kelvin, but sadly you had only a pound. And let’s assume you are a cool, rational customer who wants the best odds (admittedly this is an implausible combination of characteristics, which is why Norm might be missing the point of gambling). If you buy a single lottery ticket, and if your choice of 6 numbers matches 5 winning balls plus the bonus number (a 7th ball drawn) then this generally wins around £100,000 and has a probability 1 in 2,330,636.

Or you could go for an accumulator on the horses or dogs like Kelvin: pick a meeting with 6 races, and in each race choose a horse at medium odds of around 6–1. An accumulator, in which the winnings of each race are passed to the next horse, will give you 7×7×7×7×7×7 = £117,000 if they all win. Given a bookmaker’s margin of, say, 12 per cent each bet, the true odds may be around 1 in 230,000, ten times as good as the lottery.

If you can find a casino that will let you bet just £1, place it on your lucky number between 1 and 36. When it wins, either leave the £36
there or move it to another number. When that comes up too, move the £1,296 you now have to another number, or leave it where it is – it doesn’t make any difference to the odds, but somehow it seems that the chance increases when the money is moved. When that comes up, you will have £46,656, so move it all to Red, and when that comes up you will have £93,312, almost enough for your Maserati. The chances of this happening, on a European roulette wheel with one zero, are 1/37×1/37×1/37×18/37 = 1 in 104,120, twice as good as the horses.

So roulette easily gives the best chance of that shiny Maserati for a quid. Perhaps it’s better to start saving.

13
AVERAGE RISKS

N
ORM’S LIFE LACKED
… what? He was 38 years old and didn’t know. But he knew missing when he saw it. This depressed him, although in truth not much. He was more moderately pissed off than depressed proper. That almost depressed him too, in a middling kind of way. Where was life’s, erm … you know? He tipped back on his chair and considered the curtains.

Like any average kind of guy, Norm knew in his heart that he was better than most. Proving it, that was the problem. In an effort at least to stand out he had taken up groovy habits like wearing striped socks or, for edge – you need edge – swearing a bit. Taking pleasure where he liked, whatever anyone said, he slipped into his shopping basket – alongside a two-pint carton of semi-skimmed milk, pre-packed sliced ham, breakfast cereal and a chicken korma (mild) ready-meal – a bar of milk chocolate.
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But that’s how Norm was these days: more of his own man, picking out his own personal style in the Boden catalogue. But still he lacked … you know …

He turned over an old envelope and wrote ‘NORM’ at the top, underlined, twice. On the left, he wrote ‘Earnings’, drew a line down the middle and scribbled on the right: ‘£28,270’. He stared at the number.

It was weirdly familiar. He looked it up. He was right. It was the UK average.
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How funny, to earn exactly the average for a full-time male employee.

‘Height’, he wrote, and then ‘5’9”’. He looked that up too, on the Office for National Statistics website. Also about average. Not too surprising, that one, he supposed.

Weight: Just over 13 stone. He stared at the number, too, thinking. Then likewise looked it up. Again, average.

Weekly working hours: 39. Which turned out with a little research … he shifted in his chair and chewed his pencil.

Age at marriage … number of cups of coffee drunk per day … this was getting more than a little weird.

As he scribbled one stat after another on the envelope and then chewed the pencil as he typed a search into Google, they all gave the same, uncanny answer.

Age at which he had his first child … He was afraid to find out. Commuting time, hours spent watching TV, shoe size, number of fillings? He hated to think, but felt the answer in his bones already. How could one man be able to tick so many boxes, all in the middle?

For years Norm had yearned for the big event, the moment that would mark him out as unique, the way people do. He might even have worked harder for it but for the effort. Instead, he raised himself in his estimation by fine observations of the inferiority of the world at large: TV presenters’ grammar, other motorists’ speed – damn eejits who drove faster, doddering gits who didn’t. And all the while, here he was, bang in the middle. The implications were terrifying. He’d have to read the
Daily Mail
. He did read the
Daily Mail
(his wife’s).

Could he fight it? He was tempted. Yes, to rebel, to throw off what seemed a fate of stifling, mediocre mediocrity, hyper-normality, and do something uniquely impulsive and, oh, anything really … like, like … getting drunk.

Norm tapped his pencil on his teeth and stared again at the curtains. Was he humiliated? He wasn’t sure. It was a lot to take in, this strange new status as some sort of, erm … He tapped his teeth some more. Then, abruptly, he stopped.

He sat back. He smiled. He put his hands behind his head. His smile grew, like that of a man who knew. He radiated satisfaction.

‘Oh yes,’ he said, not unlike John Major. ‘Oh yes!’

THIS IS NORM’S APOTHEOSIS
, the shining pinnacle of his narrative arc and moment of self-discovery – how bog-standard average he is. Quite simply, it makes him unique. That sounds absurd. How can anyone be uniquely average?

Norm can, because the average is not normally an individual quality, it describes everyone blended together. So it might apply to no one in particular, or at least to no individual, except, uniquely, to Norm.

He was always an average kind of guy – that much we knew – but we had no idea what a paragon of the ordinary he was. Nor did he. Plumb in the middle of the middle, the model of mediocrity, he probably drives a Ford Fiesta and holidays in Ibiza. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but is it a special cause for satisfaction? And yet Norm smiles.

Perhaps because being average is strangely useful if you worry about the future, especially if you look to numbers for help. For all risks on which we stick numbers and probabilities are, in fact, averages.

So when it is said that you have a 20 per cent higher chance of developing colorectal or pancreatic cancer if you eat an extra sausage every day, it does not mean that you personally face this increased risk; it means the average person does. So the average risk – or simply risk, for all risks are averaged over some group or other – describes Norm’s future more reliably than it describes anyone else’s, all those others – like you – who in some particular way differ from the average. Are they talking about me? On the whole, no. In Norm’s case, yes. It’s a bit like the child’s fantasy that the world is designed around me. For Norm, it’s sort of true. What an ego trip for a man who can’t even make up his mind about Marmite.

Norm – in a neat paradox for a man so unexceptional – is the archetype for man. He is no one and everyman. He is in no way outstanding and, precisely because of that, outstanding. He is both prototypical and a one-off (add more oxymorons at will …). They should put up his statue – outside Tesco.

Not that this idea is without problems. We’ll come to those in a moment. Meanwhile, allow Norm his strange glory.

The idea of the average person has itself become ordinary, but it is a statistical invention only about 150 years old. It originated with a
19th-century Belgian statistician, Adolphe Quetelet, who believed that the essential characteristics of the average man, ‘
l’homme moyen
’, could be discovered by gathering data about the whole population, putting it on a graph and looking for underlying patterns, peaks or regularities.

Quetelet wrote: ‘If an individual at any given epoch of society possessed all the qualities of an average man, he would represent all that is great, good and beautiful.’
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Cue Norm. As Mr Average, he has more hope than most of being in tune with life’s regularities. Though if he had entirely average characteristics, he would also have about one testicle and about one breast. That is what happens when you add together a whole population. You find that an equal share of all the parts does not necessarily add up to a coherent human being. But Quetelet – a brilliant statistician – was not, in principle, deterred. He seems to have believed that the average was more than an abstraction, and thought that many averages represented genuine physical or mental capacities awaiting discovery, including moral capacities.

But Norm’s satisfaction is everyone else’s problem. Ordinarily, as we say, no one is precisely average in the many respects that determine the risks they face. Perhaps they are a little heavier, a little richer, or poorer, slightly more tense, sleep a little worse, are taller, slower, more sedentary, more tempted by cake, picked up some odd genes from a deranged ancestor, and who knows what else that might make a difference to their future, might tip the balance for or against survival to make the odds better or worse than average.