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what-weve-lost-actively playing-the-lottery

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t my local comfort keep, and Virtually surely at yours, much too, it can be done to order upward of fifty distinct styles of scratch-off lottery tickets. To take action, you will need to be not less than eighteen yrs outdated, Though the tickets appear like the décor for a kindergarten classroom. The dominant themes are Major colors, greenback signals, and glossy, as in gold bars, taking pictures stars, glinting horseshoes, and stacks of silver cash. If you are taking a look at a stable wall of them, In addition they resemble—determined by the palette, font options, and typical flashy hecticness—the mid-nineties Net. A number of them are named for other games, such as the Monopoly X5, the Double Blackjack, along with the Family Feud, but most are easy about the point of buying them: Display Me $10,000!, $one hundred,000 Blessed, Funds Explosion, Cash Is King, Blazing Hot Income, Major Hard cash Riches. When your style operates towards Rapid Ca£h or Purple Ball Funds Doubler, You should purchase a person for merely a buck; if you like VIP Club or $2,000,000 Gold Hurry, one ticket will set you back 30 bucks. All this is prior to deciding to get into the Decide 3, Pick four, Powerball, and Mega Tens of millions tickets, which happen to be comparatively staid in overall look—they seem like Scantron sheets—and are printed out at enough time of purchase.

The strangest of the many Bizarre issues about these tickets is, unlike other ease-store staples—Utz potato chips, Entenmann’s cinnamon-swirl buns, $one.ninety eight bottles of wine—They are really brought for you by your point out governing administration. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah will not be in the organization of promoting lottery tickets. All over the place else, Blazing Sizzling Funds and its ilk are, like state parks and driver’s licenses, a authorities company.

How this came to become is the subject of a fantastic new e-book, “For the Greenback in addition to a Desire: State Lotteries in Contemporary The us,” because of the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s e book is really a peculiar contradiction: around the 1 hand, the lottery is vastly significantly less profitable than its proponents ensure it is out to generally be, a deception which has appear with the expenditure of community coffers and community products and services. Alternatively, it is so well-liked that it is equally incredibly worthwhile to the private organizations which make and offer tickets and monetarily crippling for its most committed players. One in two American Grown ups buys a lottery ticket at least every year, a single in four buys a single not less than as soon as per month, and by far the most avid players obtain them at premiums that might shock you. At my community shop, some shoppers snap up whole rolls—at a minimum amount, three hundred dollars’ value of tickets—and others present up each morning, Participate in until finally they win something, then come back in the night and do it once more. All of this, recurring every day at grocery retailers and liquor suppliers and mini-marts across the country, renders the lottery a ninety-just one-billion-dollar small business. “Us citizens shell out additional on lottery tickets annually than on cigarettes, coffee, or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “plus they commit a lot more on lottery tickets per year than on video clip streaming providers, concert tickets, textbooks, and Motion picture tickets put together.”

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As These two sets of comparisons propose, lottery tickets can appear to be both a benign kind of enjoyment or simply a hazardous addiction. The issue that lurks in just “To get a Greenback and also a Desire” is which class they seriously belong to—and, accordingly, whether or not governments charged with advertising and marketing the final welfare must be inside the business enterprise of producing them, publicizing them, and profiting from them.

Lotteries are an historic pastime. They have been widespread inside the Roman Empire—Nero was a fan of them; make of that what you might—and so are attested to through the Bible, exactly where the casting of a lot is used for everything from selecting another king of Israel to picking who can get to help keep Jesus’ garments following the Crucifixion. In several of such early circumstances, they have been deployed either to be a form of celebration activity—throughout Roman Saturnalias, tickets ended up dispersed cost-free to visitors, some of whom gained extravagant prizes—or as a means of divining God’s will. Often, nevertheless, lotteries ended up arranged to lift cash for community will work. The earliest recognized Edition of keno dates to the Han dynasty and is said to acquire served buy The good Wall of China. Two centuries later, Caesar Augustus commenced a lottery to subsidize repairs for town of Rome.

With the fourteen-hundreds, the apply was typical from the Minimal International locations, which relied on lotteries to make town fortifications and, afterwards, to provide charity for the bad. Before long sufficient, the development produced its approach to England, exactly where, in 1567, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the country’s 1st lottery, designating its revenue for “reparation with the Havens and toughness in the Realme.” Tickets cost 10 shillings, a significant sum back then, and, Besides the possible prize worth, every one served as a get-out-of-jail-free of charge card, basically; each individual lottery participant was entitled to immunity from arrest, apart from selected felonies which include piracy, murder, and treason.

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The lottery didn't a great deal unfold to America from England as assistance unfold England into The us: the ecu settlement of the continent was financed partly by lotteries. They then became typical within the colonies themselves, Regardless of strong Protestant proscriptions versus gambling. Within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which held its first approved lottery in 1745, dice and participating in playing cards have been forbidden even in personal households.

That contradiction is often explained in part by exigency; regardless of what its ethical bent, early The us was limited on income and prolonged on the necessity for general public functions. As time passes, Additionally, it turned, as Cohen notes, “described politically by its aversion to taxation.” That created the lottery an interesting substitute for raising funds, which was employed for funding everything from civil protection to the construction of church buildings. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have been all financed partly by lotteries, along with the Continental Congress tried to utilize a single to help you pay for the Innovative War. (Lotteries shaped a exceptional issue of arrangement between Thomas Jefferson, who regarded them as not Considerably riskier than farming, and Alexander Hamilton, who grasped what would turn into their essence: that everybody “would favor a small prospect of successful a terrific offer to a fantastic prospect of successful minimal.”) And, like almost every little thing else in early The united states, lotteries ended up tousled with the slave trade, at times in unpredictable strategies. George Washington at the time managed a Virginia-based lottery whose prizes provided human beings, and 1 formerly enslaved guy, Denmark Vesey, ordered his independence immediately after successful a South Carolina lottery and went on to foment a slave rebellion.

This Preliminary period of the American lottery was brought to an end by popular issue about mismanagement and malfeasance. Involving 1833 and 1880, each and every state but one banned the practice, leaving only the infamously corrupt Louisiana Condition Lottery Business in operation. Inspite of its identify, the L.S.L.C. efficiently operated across the country, sending adverts and promoting tickets by mail. So impressive was it that, as Cohen clarifies, it took the federal federal government to eliminate it off; in 1890, Congress passed a law prohibiting the interstate marketing or sale of lottery tickets, therefore devastating the Louisiana video game and, In the interim, Placing a prevent to point out lotteries in the usa.

Predictably, from the absence of legal lotteries, illegal ones flourished—previously mentioned all, numbers games, which awarded every day prizes for properly guessing A 3-digit selection. To stop allegations that the game was mounted, each day’s successful number was dependant on a publicly out there but continuously transforming resource, including the amount of money traded about the The big apple Inventory Trade. Numbers online games ended up enormously popular just about everywhere—in 1964, they raked in two hundred million pounds, about two billion in now’s cash, in Ny city on your own—but especially so in Black communities, exactly where they supplied a Considerably needed supply of money. This was legitimate primarily for his or her organizers and runners, whose ranks incorporated Ella Fitzgerald and Malcolm X, but occasionally also for gamers who lucked right into a windfall, like Luther Theophilus Powell, who gained 10 thousand pounds on a twenty-five dollar bet while in the nineteen-fifties and applied it to get a household in Queens for his spouse, daughter, and young son, Colin Powell.

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Ultimately, figures game titles proved so rewarding which they were being taken around by organized criminal offense, from time to time Together with the help of police officers who accepted bribes to shut down African American operators. Dutch Schultz and Vito Genovese both equally applied the sport to help you bankroll their functions, and the Winter Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger’s crew, bought its begin partly by managing figures in Somerville, outside Boston. By the nineteen-fifties, rising issue with regard to the power and attain from the Mob culminated inside of a Senate investigation, the Kefauver committee, which judged revenue from gambling to become the primary fiscal motor of criminal offense syndicates in the united states. This declaration, as well as the torrent of news protection it created, experienced a paradoxical effect: it designed lottery games appear so rewarding that, right after a long time of dismissing them as inappropriate to the honorable small business of public services, state governments Yet again began to take into consideration receiving in around the consider.

It can be at this stage that Cohen’s narrative genuinely receives likely; While he nods on the early background with the lottery, he focusses mainly on its modern-day incarnation. This started, he argues, when increasing recognition about all The cash being produced within the gambling organization collided that has a disaster in state funding. From the nineteen-sixties, beneath the burden of the swelling inhabitants, increasing inflation, and the cost of the Vietnam War, The united states’s prosperity started to wane. For lots of states, Primarily the ones that delivered a generous social protection Internet, balancing the budget turned increasingly complicated without having both elevating taxes or chopping products and services. The difficulty was that both choices had been particularly unpopular with voters.

For politicians confronting this issue, the lottery seemed to be an ideal Answer: a means to take care of present expert services with no hiking taxes—and for that reason with no obtaining punished with the polls. For them, Cohen writes, lotteries have been essentially “budgetary miracles, the possibility for states to create profits surface seemingly away from thin air.” For instance, in New Jersey, which experienced no revenue tax, no revenue tax, and no urge for food for instituting either a single, legislators claimed that a lottery would herald a huge selection of a lot of pounds, thus relieving them of the necessity to at any time once again ponder the disagreeable matter of taxation.

Dismissing long-standing ethical objections into the lottery, these new advocates reasoned that, considering the fact that people had been going to gamble anyway, the condition could possibly too pocket the income. That argument experienced its restrictions—by its logic, governments should also market heroin—nonetheless it gave ethical cover to folks who authorized of lotteries for other motives. A lot of white voters, Cohen writes, supported legalization mainly because they thought point out-operate gambling would primarily attract Black quantities players, who'd then foot the Invoice for companies that These white voters didn’t want to purchase anyway, such as improved educational institutions inside the urban parts they had currently fled. (In reality, the oft-recurring assert that legalizing the lottery would merely decriminalize current gamblers as opposed to produce new ones of all races proved drastically Improper.) In the meantime, several African American voters supported legalization given that they believed that it could ease their friction Together with the law enforcement, for whom quantities video games had very long served as a cause—occasionally respectable, from time to time not—to interrogate and imprison people today of shade.

Lottery opponents, having said that, questioned each the ethics of funding community services by way of gambling along with the amount of money that states truly stood to get. Such critics hailed from both sides in the political aisle and all walks of existence, but by far the most vociferous of them have been devout Protestants, who regarded federal government-sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable. (Catholics, by contrast, ended up overwhelmingly Professional-lottery, played it in massive numbers when it had been legalized, and reliably flocked to other gambling online games as well; Cohen cites the staggering proven fact that, in 1978, “bingo games hosted by Ohio Catholic superior educational facilities took in extra money compared to condition’s lottery.”) As a single Methodist minister and anti-lottery activist declared at the time, “There may be additional arrangement amongst Protestant teams to the adverse result of gambling than on some other social challenge, such as the problems with abortion, Alcoholic beverages, and homosexuality.” These kinds of adverse results bundled fostering gambling addictions, sapping profits from your very poor, undermining standard civic and moral ideals by championing a path to prosperity that didn't involve advantage or exertions, and encouraging point out governments To optimize revenue even for the price in their most vulnerable citizens.

Nonetheless valid these fears might need been, they ended up mostly dismissed. In 1964, New Hampshire, famously tax averse, accredited the primary condition-run lottery of the fashionable period. Thirteen states followed in as many years, all of them during the Northeast and also the Rust Belt. In the meantime, as Cohen recounts, the nation’s late-twentieth-century tax revolt intensified. In 1978, California handed Proposition 13, reducing residence taxes by Practically sixty for each cent and inspiring other states to follow fit; in the early nineteen-eighties, with Ronald Reagan during the White Dwelling, federal money flowing into condition coffers declined. With Increasingly more states casting close to for remedies for their budgetary crises which would not enrage an significantly anti-tax electorate, the attractiveness in the lottery unfold south and west.

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As Cohen relates in perhaps the most fascinating chapter of his book, People Professional-lottery forces experienced a strong ally in Scientific Online games, Inc., a lottery-ticket maker that to start with designed a name for itself by groundbreaking scratch-off tickets. As well as delivering prompt effects, these tickets, like Ikea household furniture, provide the attractiveness of Lively participation, which supplies players the illusion of performing exercises some Handle in excess of the end result. Scratch-off tickets débuted to terrific achievement in Massachusetts in 1974; by 1976, just about every point out lottery experienced jumped on the bandwagon. But that triumph introduced a challenge for Scientific Video games, since it intended that the available market was saturated. To help keep expanding its company, the organization established about persuading a lot more states to legalize the lottery. Beginning during the late seventies, S.G.I. started employing lobbyists, contracting with promotion firms, creating astroturf citizens’ groups, and investing many bucks to steer voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, as well as the District of Columbia to move lottery initiatives.

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Scientific Online games wasn't the one corporation supplying lottery products and services, but its rivals had mainly eschewed lobbying, nominally out of moral worries but truly given that they were reluctant to invest income they wouldn’t recoup whenever they didn’t land the ensuing contracts. S.G.I. received all around this difficulty by making sure which the lottery initiatives it backed contained language—allegedly intended to reduce the involvement of arranged criminal offense—that essential considerable money disclosures not merely from all the executives at firms submitting a bid but from all the executives at their father or mother companies, far too. That necessity by itself manufactured the bidding system also burdensome to be worthwhile for S.G.I.’s chief competitor, Webcraft Games, since it was owned by Beatrice Foods, which at the time was larger sized than Lockheed Martin, 3M, and Coca-Cola. The S.G.I.-supported initiatives also mandated tight timelines for the bidding process, offering the company a organizing edge whilst making it practically unattainable for anyone else to complete the paperwork in time.

Even so dodgy this method might are, it worked. Each and every lottery initiative backed by S.G.I. succeeded—and, in each and every scenario, the corporation was rewarded by using a contract. That intended its lobbying investment decision paid off, spectacularly; in California, As an illustration, S.G.I. put in $2.four million to pass a lottery initiative, then gained the ensuing forty-million-greenback agreement. Wins like that quickly turned Scientific Games into an unstoppable drive in the lottery marketplace. By 1982, the company experienced printed its 5-billionth ticket and was developing a million more each individual hour. Simultaneously, the lottery business alone experienced turn out to be unstoppable, much too—thanks to S.G.I. as well as the wave of legalizations, but also because of the introduction of the new edition of an exceptionally outdated video game of prospect that, as Cohen writes, “essentially reshaped the position of lotteries in American Culture.”

Based on a betting match initially performed in seventeenth-century Genoa, lotto just isn't self-evidently groundbreaking—or, for that matter, self-evidently interesting. To play, you guess a certain amount of numbers from a specified selection. The Big apple Lotto, For example, requires six figures among a person and fifty-9; the North Carolina lotto, five numbers between 1 and forty-three. The odds of having each of the numbers right are absurdly very low—which, paradoxically, is why lotto revolutionized the field.

Before the sport was launched, point out jackpots have been fairly modest. Their dimensions was restricted by the quantity of players, considering that payouts mirrored a proportion of ticket product sales, along with by point out lottery commissions, which set a cap about the prize cash; from 1964 to 1979, jackpots rarely exceeded 1,000,000 bucks. But lotto was a rollover sport: if a drawing was held and no-one won—a standard incidence, given the percentages—gamers could maintain shopping for tickets. For anyone profiting from your lottery, this made a virtuous cycle. Each time the pot acquired even larger, more and more people have been tempted to get a ticket, as well as the more and more people purchased tickets, The larger the pot turned.

The complete factor was hugely counterintuitive—the even worse the odds of profitable turned, the more and more people wished to Participate in. Alexander Hamilton was proper: to the typical person, the distinction between just one-in-three-million odds and a single-in-three-hundred-million odds didn’t issue, however the distinction between a three-million-dollar jackpot and A 3-hundred-million-dollar jackpot mattered enormously. Recognizing this, lottery commissioners started lifting prize caps and including a lot more numbers—say, 6 away from fifty as opposed to 5 outside of thirty—As a result building the likelihood of winning even smaller sized. The New York Lotto released, in 1978, with 1-in-3.8-million odds; nowadays, the chances are a person in forty-five million.

Even with all this, and also to the despair of statisticians everywhere, lotto before long turned the country’s hottest lottery video game. But Though ticket gross sales and prize winnings soared, they didn't accomplish that Similarly across the country, considering the fact that rollover jackpots disproportionately benefitted states with huge populations and therefore extra prospective gamers. In response, scaled-down states banded alongside one another to variety multistate lotteries, a trend that culminated in Powerball and Mega Thousands and thousands, Each and every of which begun being a collaboration among the A few states but is now performed all over the place the lottery is authorized. The ensuing prizes are genuinely astronomical; this earlier July, two folks who purchased a lottery ticket in Illinois bucked just one-in-3-hundred-and-two-million odds to win a $one.34-billion Mega Hundreds of thousands jackpot.

In some respects, the fashionable American lotto recreation is an item of technological transform; it could not have existed before Pc applications that enabled states to find out kind of quickly no matter whether everyone experienced acquired a ticket While using the profitable numbers. But Cohen tends to make a persuasive circumstance that it was also a product of cultural transform: the tip of a shared reverence for middle-class stability as well as rise, inside the nineteen-eighties, with the veneration of extravagant prosperity. The many years in which lotto reshaped the nationwide gambling scene had been the yrs of deregulation and Reaganomics, Donald J. Trump and Alex P. Keaton, the première of “Existence from the Loaded and Well-known” in addition to a remake of “Brewster’s Thousands and thousands.” Pastors were being preaching the prosperity gospel; politicians were singing the praises of your unfettered free of charge industry. Instantly, Cohen writes, “it absolutely was not taboo to gather a huge fortune; neither was it offensive to indicate it off. Prosperity—not the prosperity of blue-collar workers nevertheless the fortunes in their bosses—became a way of reasserting the bounty of capitalism.”

The irony, as Cohen notes, is that this obsession with unimaginable wealth, including the aspiration of hitting a multimillion-greenback lottery jackpot, corresponded to a decline in monetary security for most Operating persons. Starting inside the nineteen-seventies and accelerating while in the nineteen-eighties, the earnings hole among the wealthy plus the bad widened, work protection and pensions eroded, overall health-care expenditures and unemployment rose, and, for kids born in Individuals decades, our extensive-standing nationwide guarantee—that training and hard work would render them better off than their parents—ceased for being real. Daily life, because it turned out, imitated the lottery: for many Us residents, it was getting more difficult and more difficult to win.

The lottery was alleged to make All of this better, not even worse. Its advocates claimed that, by filling state coffers with out increasing state taxes, it might keep revenue from the pockets of typical citizens. But this premise, which led state following state to approve lotteries, was only untrue. Evidence from the initial legalized lotteries quickly place paid to the fantasy that they would provide adequate profits to fund much of your company of running a point out. In New Jersey, the place proponents experienced imagined proceeds to the purchase of many hundreds of countless dollars, the lottery brought in thirty-3 million bucks in its initial year—about two for each cent from the state’s earnings.

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When figures like that proved standard of the era, legalization advocates, now not able to provide the lottery for a statewide silver bullet, ginned up other procedures alternatively, frequently with the assistance of Scientific Video games. Instead of argue that a lottery would float the vast majority of a point out’s funds, they commenced saying that it could deal with one line item, invariably a authorities company that was well-liked and nonpartisan—most frequently schooling, but occasionally elder treatment or public parks or help for veterans. One advantage of the narrower tactic was that it produced campaigning for legalization uncomplicated. A vote with the lottery wasn't a technique for supporting gambling but a method of supporting veterans; a vote against the lottery was a vote in opposition to education and learning.

These campaignsหวย ลาว ล่าสุด were being extraordinarily productive but, just like the earlier types, basically misleading. For something, they, too, wildly inflated the affect of lottery revenue on state funds. In California, where an S.G.I.-backed lottery initiative passed following a higher-profile campaign touted it as being a boon for schoolchildren, the resulting profits protected, inside the lottery’s 1st yr, about five for every cent on the state education and learning spending plan. As of the yr, based on the California Department of Education, lottery income accounts for about 1 per cent of all K-12 funding.

But which was not the worst of it. Many times, training together with other line products that served to persuade persons to go lottery proposals did not essentially get any additional funding; as an alternative, the income went in the state’s common fund. After this happened in California, other states mandated that lottery cash stream immediately into specified programs, but, as is so frequently the case, when 1 loophole closes, A further 1 opens. In Illinois, Florida, and Virginia, between other states, the lottery revenue did without a doubt visit a designated training fund—whereupon legislators offset those gains by cutting down The cash coming in from basic appropriations. Ultimately, Cohen writes, “the lottery supplanted, rather than supplemented, point out spending on education.”

These days, in accordance with the Nationwide Meeting of Point out Legislatures, lotteries herald, on typical, about a person for each cent of point out income each year. Like all money, it matters, but whatever big difference it will make is offset by two issues. The main is that lotteries have manufactured it more durable than ever before to move Substantially desired tax will increase, since, thanks to several years of noisy campaigning accompanied by decades of heavy marketing, the general public wrongly thinks that schools along with other important companies are lavishly supported by gambling cash. The 2nd would be that the funds lifted by lotteries arrives mainly within the individuals that can least find the money for to element with it. Every single point out lottery is regressive, which means that it will require a disproportionate toll on lower-money citizens. Rich folks do Enjoy the lottery, obviously; one among the biggest-ever Powerball jackpots, 1 / 4 of a billion bucks, was won by 3 asset supervisors from Greenwich, Connecticut. But the rich buy much less tickets compared to weak (other than when jackpots strategy ten figures); because of that and since their buys represent a Significantly smaller sized share in their cash flow, participating in the lottery features a far smaller impact on their pocketbooks. The difference is often drastic: according to the buyer money company Bankrate, players generating more than fifty thousand pounds per year devote, on common, just one per cent of their once-a-year profits on lottery tickets; Individuals earning under 30 thousand pounds commit 13 for every cent. That means a person generating 20-7 thousand pounds loses some 30-5 hundred pounds towards the lottery on a yearly basis. To place that range in context, practically sixty for every cent of Americans have below a thousand bucks in cost savings.

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Defenders in the lottery sometimes Solid it for a tax to the stupid, which means possibly that players don’t know how unlikely They're to get or which they enjoy the activity anyway. This implies that lottery paying out is a wholly own rather then a partly structural determination, but In point of fact it really is conscious of financial fluctuation; as Cohen writes, “Lottery income increase as incomes fall, unemployment grows, and poverty costs rise.” As with all commercial goods, lottery sales also maximize with exposure to marketing—and lottery products are most closely promoted in neighborhoods which might be disproportionately inadequate, Black, or Latino. In Texas, exactly where the minimum wage is $7.25, You should purchase a fifty-dollar scratch-off ticket in a Check out-cashing location or pick up Powerball and Mega Hundreds of thousands tickets, like Snickers bars, even though purchasing groceries in a Greenback Common. Nor are point out lottery commissions earlier mentioned availing by themselves from the psychology of addiction. Anything with regards to the lottery—from ad campaigns to the glance from the entrance from the tickets and The mathematics driving them—is made to continue to keep players coming back for more. None of the is particularly distinct with the procedures of tobacco companies or video-activity suppliers. It just isn’t Typically accomplished underneath the auspices of the government.

In the final pages of “For just a Dollar and also a Desire,” Cohen, a fair and meticulous collector of data, ultimately places his thumb on the scale. Thinking about the regressive character of point out lotteries, their predatory procedures, their role in fostering gambling addictions, the way in which they discourage ordinary taxation, and their reasonably modest money contributions, he concludes they “shouldn't exist in the trendy U . s ..” As he acknowledges, this recommendation is unlikely for being taken at any time soon; no condition has repealed its lottery in greater than 100 and twenty-5 years. Nonetheless, he argues, we should always perform toward frequent-perception reforms, including banning the sale of tickets on line, capping the cost of scratch-off tickets and the size of lotto jackpots, and, Most likely most critical, closing a loophole that leaves lotteries exempt from File.T.C. regulation, and so no cost through the constraints of truth-in-advertising legal guidelines.

What would materialize if state lotteries waned in influence or vanished entirely? Cohen absolutely overreaches when he promises that, “with out this type of blinding beacon, far more Us residents could be willing to Feel critically with regard to the economic forces which have degraded access to social mobility and have designed it harder for folks to achieve economic stability.” But he is true that governments in a very democratic society need to be while in the business enterprise of bettering the chances, not rigging the sport, and that there are a lot more equitable and successful strategies for the state to employ its mighty powers to improve existence for its citizens. As being the California Lottery set it in a 2013 marketing marketing campaign, “Believe in a thing larger.” ♦