t my local advantage shop, and almost undoubtedly at yours, way too, it can be done to get upward of fifty distinctive kinds of scratch-off lottery tickets. To take action, you will need to be a minimum of eighteen several years old, Despite the fact that the tickets look like the décor for a kindergarten classroom. The dominant themes are Major colours, greenback indicators, and glossy, as in gold bars, taking pictures stars, glinting horseshoes, and stacks of silver cash. When you find yourself checking out a stable wall of them, Additionally they resemble—determined by the palette, font decisions, and typical flashy hecticness—the mid-nineties Net. Many of them are named for other video games, like the Monopoly X5, the Double Blackjack, and the Family members Feud, but most are straightforward about The purpose of shopping for them: Present Me $ten,000!, $one hundred,000 Lucky, Revenue Explosion, Hard cash Is King, Blazing Warm Hard cash, Huge Hard cash Riches. In the event your taste runs towards Fast Ca$h or Pink Ball Money Doubler, You should purchase 1 for just a buck; if you prefer VIP Club or $2,000,000 Gold Rush, a single ticket will set you back again thirty dollars. All this is before you decide to get into the Decide 3, Decide 4, Powerball, and Mega Millions tickets, which can be comparatively staid in overall look—they seem like Scantron sheets—and so are printed out at some time of invest in.

The strangest of the various Unusual points about these tickets is usually that, in contrast to other ease-retail outlet staples—Utz potato chips, Entenmann’s cinnamon-swirl buns, $one.98 bottles of wine—they are introduced to you by your point out authorities. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah will not be inside the company of marketing lottery tickets. Everywhere else, Blazing Very hot Hard cash and its ilk are, like condition parks and driver’s licenses, a federal government service.

How this arrived to be is the topic of an excellent new reserve, “For any Greenback and also a Dream: Point out Lotteries in Present day The usa,” through the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s e book is actually a peculiar contradiction: over the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents enable it to be out being, a deception which has arrive in the cost of public coffers and general public services. On the other hand, it is so common that it's equally very lucrative to the private businesses which make and offer tickets and fiscally crippling for its most dedicated gamers. A single in two American Grown ups buys a lottery ticket not less than annually, one particular in 4 purchases one particular at the very least the moment a month, and the most avid gamers invest in them at prices that might shock you. At my neighborhood store, some customers snap up whole rolls—at a minimum, three hundred bucks’ worth of tickets—and Other people present up in the morning, play until they earn a thing, then come back during the evening and do it all over again. All of this, repeated every day at grocery stores and liquor stores and mini-marts across the country, renders the lottery a ninety-1-billion-greenback organization. “Individuals commit more on lottery tickets each year than on cigarettes, coffee, or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “and they commit extra on lottery tickets annually than on video clip streaming solutions, concert tickets, textbooks, and Film tickets blended.”

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As People two sets of comparisons counsel, lottery tickets can appear to be either a benign sort of entertainment or simply a unsafe habit. The concern that lurks within just “To get a Dollar and a Aspiration” is which category they definitely belong to—and, accordingly, whether or not governments billed with endorsing the overall welfare needs to be within the business enterprise of producing them, publicizing them, and profiting from them.

Lotteries are an historic pastime. They had been popular inside the Roman Empire—Nero was a lover of them; make of that what you are going to—and they are attested to through the entire Bible, wherever the casting of tons is utilized for everything from choosing the following king of Israel to choosing who will get to maintain Jesus’ clothes following the Crucifixion. In lots of of these early situations, they had been deployed either as a style of bash video game—through Roman Saturnalias, tickets have been dispersed absolutely free to friends, some of whom gained extravagant prizes—or as a method of divining God’s will. Generally, although, lotteries were being organized to raise funds for community is effective. The earliest regarded Model of keno dates towards the Han dynasty and is said to get assisted buy the Great Wall of China. Two centuries later on, Caesar Augustus started out a lottery to subsidize repairs for the city of Rome.

Via the fourteen-hundreds, the practice was frequent inside the Small International locations, which relied on lotteries to create town fortifications and, later on, to offer charity for that poor. Before long sufficient, the development made its technique to England, where, in 1567, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the nation’s initial lottery, designating its earnings for “reparation in the Havens and energy on the Realme.” Tickets Value ten shillings, a hefty sum back then, and, Together with the likely prize worth, each served to be a get-out-of-jail-no cost card, practically; each and every lottery participant was entitled to immunity from arrest, except for specific felonies which include piracy, murder, and treason.

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The lottery did not a great deal of unfold to America from England as help unfold England into The usa: the eu settlement on the continent was financed partially as a result of lotteries. They then grew to become popular while in the colonies on their own, Inspite of powerful Protestant proscriptions from gambling. During the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which held its first authorized lottery in 1745, dice and enjoying cards have been forbidden even in private properties.

That contradiction may be spelled out partially by exigency; regardless of what its ethical bent, early The united states was short on earnings and prolonged on the necessity for general public performs. After some time, Additionally, it turned, as Cohen notes, “defined politically by its aversion to taxation.” That produced the lottery an pleasing substitute for elevating funds, which was used for funding anything from civil protection to the construction of churches. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were all financed partly by lotteries, along with the Continental Congress attempted to implement just one to help buy the Groundbreaking War. (Lotteries shaped a uncommon stage of settlement concerning Thomas Jefferson, who regarded them as not A great deal riskier than farming, and Alexander Hamilton, who grasped what would change into their essence: that everyone “would favor a small potential for winning an awesome deal to an incredible possibility of successful minimal.”) And, like Practically everything else in early The united states, lotteries have been tousled Using the slave trade, often in unpredictable means. George Washington as soon as managed a Virginia-primarily based lottery whose prizes incorporated human beings, and one particular formerly enslaved guy, Denmark Vesey, obtained his freedom following profitable a South Carolina lottery and went on to foment a slave rebellion.

This First era of the American lottery was introduced to an finish by popular worry about mismanagement and malfeasance. Among 1833 and 1880, each condition but 1 banned the exercise, leaving only the infamously corrupt Louisiana Condition Lottery Enterprise in operation. Irrespective of its identify, the L.S.L.C. efficiently operated across the nation, sending adverts and promoting tickets by mail. So strong was it that, as Cohen clarifies, it took the federal government to kill it off; in 1890, Congress passed a regulation prohibiting the interstate advertising or sale of lottery tickets, thus devastating the Louisiana game and, In the interim, putting a stop to point out lotteries in America.

Predictably, from the absence of lawful lotteries, unlawful kinds flourished—previously mentioned all, figures online games, which awarded day by day prizes for accurately guessing a three-digit quantity. To avoid allegations that the game was preset, day after day’s winning range was determined by a publicly obtainable but constantly modifying supply, including the amount of cash traded around the Ny Stock Exchange. Figures video games ended up enormously well known just about everywhere—in 1964, they raked in two hundred million bucks, about two billion in right now’s funds, in New York City by itself—but Primarily so in Black communities, where by they furnished a Substantially essential source of profits. This was real mainly for his or her organizers and runners, whose ranks incorporated Ella Fitzgerald and Malcolm X, but sometimes also for gamers who lucked right into a windfall, including Luther Theophilus Powell, who gained 10 thousand dollars on the twenty-5 greenback guess inside the nineteen-fifties and applied it to purchase a property in Queens for his spouse, daughter, and younger son, Colin Powell.

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At some point, figures video games proved so rewarding that they had been taken more than by organized criminal offense, from time to time Along with the help of law enforcement officers who approved bribes to shut down African American operators. Dutch Schultz and Vito Genovese the two utilized the sport to aid bankroll their functions, as well as the Wintertime Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger’s crew, received its get started partly by managing numbers in Somerville, outdoors Boston. With the nineteen-fifties, growing worry about the power and reach from the Mob culminated inside a Senate investigation, the Kefauver committee, which judged earnings from gambling for being the primary fiscal motor of criminal offense syndicates in the united states. This declaration, along with the torrent of reports coverage it created, experienced a paradoxical influence: it designed lottery video games appear so lucrative that, just after a long time of dismissing them as inappropriate for the honorable business enterprise of community company, state governments Yet again commenced to take into consideration obtaining in to the take.

It really is at this time that Cohen’s narrative definitely receives likely; Even though he nods for the early heritage with the lottery, he focusses mainly on its modern-day incarnation. This begun, he argues, when escalating recognition about all The cash to get created within the gambling company collided with a disaster in state funding. During the nineteen-sixties, beneath the stress of a swelling inhabitants, growing inflation, and the expense of the Vietnam War, The united states’s prosperity started to wane. For a lot of states, In particular those that presented a generous social protection net, balancing the price range grew to become significantly tough devoid of possibly boosting taxes or chopping services. The difficulty was that both choices were very unpopular with voters.

For politicians confronting this issue, the lottery seemed to be an excellent Remedy: a method to keep up existing products and services devoid of hiking taxes—and as a consequence devoid of receiving punished for the polls. For them, Cohen writes, lotteries have been effectively “budgetary miracles, the possibility for states to help make revenue show up seemingly out of slim air.” For example, in New Jersey, which experienced no income tax, no cash flow tax, and no appetite for instituting either a single, legislators claimed that a lottery would herald many hundreds of countless dollars, thereby relieving them of the necessity to at any time yet again contemplate the unpleasant subject of taxation.

Dismissing lengthy-standing moral objections to your lottery, these new advocates reasoned that, considering the fact that people today ended up planning to gamble in any case, the state might likewise pocket the earnings. That argument experienced its limits—by its logic, governments must also provide heroin—nonetheless it gave ethical include to folks who authorized of lotteries for other motives. Lots of white voters, Cohen writes, supported legalization simply because they imagined condition-run gambling would largely bring in Black quantities players, who would then foot the Monthly bill for services that These white voters didn’t wish to buy in any case, for example far better faculties within the city places they had these days fled. (In fact, the oft-recurring assert that legalizing the lottery would simply decriminalize present-day gamblers in lieu of produce new types of all races proved dramatically Mistaken.) In the meantime, many African American voters supported legalization as they thought that it could relieve their friction with the police, for whom quantities game titles experienced very long served to be a reason—sometimes legitimate, sometimes not—to interrogate and imprison people of coloration.

Lottery opponents, on the other hand, questioned equally the ethics of funding public products and services by way of gambling as well as the amount of cash that states genuinely stood to gain. These critics hailed from each side on the political aisle and all walks of lifetime, but the most vociferous of these ended up devout Protestants, who regarded governing administration-sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable. (Catholics, by contrast, ended up overwhelmingly pro-lottery, played it in huge numbers the moment it absolutely was legalized, and reliably flocked to other gambling game titles as well; Cohen cites the staggering indisputable fact that, in 1978, “bingo online games hosted by Ohio Catholic superior colleges took in more money than the point out’s lottery.”) As just one Methodist minister and anti-lottery activist declared at time, “There's more arrangement amongst Protestant teams within the adverse outcome of gambling than on some other social problem, such as the problems with abortion, alcohol, and homosexuality.” These adverse effects incorporated fostering gambling addictions, sapping money from your lousy, undermining basic civic and moral ideals by championing a path to prosperity that didn't contain merit or hard work, and encouraging point out governments To optimize gains even at the expense in their most vulnerable citizens.

Even so valid these issues might have been, they were mainly dismissed. In 1964, New Hampshire, famously tax averse, accepted the very first point out-run lottery of the trendy era. 13 states adopted in as many years, all of these in the Northeast as well as Rust Belt. In the meantime, as Cohen recounts, the nation’s late-twentieth-century tax revolt intensified. In 1978, California handed Proposition thirteen, cutting residence taxes by almost sixty per cent and inspiring other states to observe suit; inside the early nineteen-eighties, with Ronald Reagan from the White Dwelling, federal money flowing into state coffers declined. With An increasing number of states casting all over for methods for their budgetary crises which would not enrage an more and more anti-tax electorate, the attraction from the lottery distribute south and west.

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As Cohen relates in Probably the most fascinating chapter of his e book, Individuals Professional-lottery forces had a strong ally in Scientific Games, Inc., a lottery-ticket producer that initially made a reputation for by itself by revolutionary scratch-off tickets. In addition to offering instantaneous effects, these tickets, like Ikea furniture, give the attraction of Lively participation, which provides gamers the illusion of exercising some control more than the result. Scratch-off tickets débuted to terrific achievement in Massachusetts in 1974; by 1976, each state lottery experienced jumped to the bandwagon. But that triumph offered a problem for Scientific Online games, since it meant which the obtainable market was saturated. To help keep growing its enterprise, the corporate established about persuading much more states to legalize the lottery. Starting off in the late seventies, S.G.I. began employing lobbyists, contracting with advertising and marketing companies, developing astroturf citizens’ teams, and paying out many pounds to steer voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, along with the District of Columbia to move lottery initiatives.

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Scientific Game titles was not the sole company furnishing lottery expert services, but its rivals experienced largely eschewed lobbying, nominally outside of ethical fears but genuinely simply because they were being reluctant to spend revenue that they wouldn’t recoup whenever they didn’t land the ensuing contracts. S.G.I. got all around this problem by making sure that the lottery initiatives it backed contained language—allegedly intended to stop the involvement of arranged crime—that essential intensive economical disclosures not only from all of the executives at organizations submitting a bid but from all the executives at their parent providers, far too. That necessity alone designed the bidding approach as well burdensome to generally be worthwhile for S.G.I.’s chief competitor, Webcraft Game titles, since it was owned by Beatrice Foods, which at enough time was bigger than Lockheed Martin, 3M, and Coca-Cola. The S.G.I.-supported initiatives also mandated restricted timelines with the bidding method, offering the company a arranging edge though rendering it practically unattainable for any person else to finish the paperwork in time.

Even so dodgy this tactic may well are actually, it labored. Every single lottery initiative backed by S.G.I. succeeded—and, in every single situation, the organization was rewarded with a deal. That meant its lobbying financial commitment paid out off, spectacularly; in California, for instance, S.G.I. expended $two.four million to pass a lottery initiative, then won the ensuing forty-million-greenback agreement. Wins like that before long turned Scientific Video games into an unstoppable drive in the lottery market. By 1982, the corporation had printed its 5-billionth ticket and was creating a million a lot more each hour. Concurrently, the lottery marketplace by itself experienced come to be unstoppable, also—as a result of S.G.I. as well as the wave of legalizations, but will also due to the introduction of the new edition of an exceptionally previous sport of likelihood that, as Cohen writes, “basically reshaped the area of lotteries in American Culture.”

Based on a betting recreation originally played in seventeenth-century Genoa, lotto is not self-evidently groundbreaking—or, for that matter, self-evidently appealing. To Engage in, you guess a specific amount of numbers from a specified array. The New York Lotto, By way of example, requires six numbers among a person and fifty-9; the North Carolina lotto, 5 figures involving a person and forty-a few. The chances of finding many of the figures appropriate are absurdly lower—which, paradoxically, is why lotto revolutionized the market.

Before the game was launched, state jackpots were being somewhat modest. Their measurement was restricted by the volume of players, since payouts reflected a share of ticket revenue, and by state lottery commissions, which set a cap over the prize funds; from 1964 to 1979, jackpots seldom exceeded 1,000,000 bucks. But lotto was a rollover activity: if a drawing was held and nobody won—a common event, provided the chances—players could hold obtaining tickets. For people profiting from the lottery, this produced a virtuous cycle. Each time the pot received larger, more and more people were being tempted to acquire a ticket, along with the more people purchased tickets, the bigger the pot grew to become.

The whole matter was hugely counterintuitive—the even worse the odds of successful turned, the more people planned to Perform. Alexander Hamilton was ideal: to the typical man or woman, the difference between a single-in-3-million odds and a person-in-a few-hundred-million odds didn’t make a difference, even so the distinction between A 3-million-dollar jackpot and a three-hundred-million-dollar jackpot mattered enormously. Recognizing this, lottery commissioners began lifting prize caps and adding much more quantities—say, 6 out of fifty instead of five from thirty—Therefore generating the probability of winning even smaller. The The big apple Lotto released, in 1978, with a person-in-three.8-million odds; today, the percentages are a person in forty-5 million.

Regardless of All of this, also to the despair of statisticians all over the place, lotto before long became the nation’s most widely used lottery video game. But Even though ticket revenue and prize winnings soared, they didn't do this Similarly across the nation, because rollover jackpots disproportionately benefitted states with massive populations and as a consequence more possible players. In reaction, lesser states banded alongside one another to variety multistate lotteries, a development that culminated in Powerball and Mega Thousands and thousands, Just about every of which commenced like a collaboration among A few states but is now performed almost everywhere the lottery is lawful. The resulting prizes are certainly astronomical; this previous July, two people who purchased a lottery ticket in Illinois bucked one-in-3-hundred-and-two-million odds to earn a $one.34-billion Mega Hundreds of thousands jackpot.

In a few respects, the fashionable American lotto game is a product of technological modify; it could not have existed previous to computer applications that enabled states to find out roughly quickly irrespective of whether any one experienced ordered a ticket Along with the successful numbers. But Cohen makes a persuasive circumstance that it had been also an item of cultural adjust: the end of the shared reverence for middle-course stability plus the rise, during the nineteen-eighties, on the veneration of extravagant prosperity. The a long time in which lotto reshaped the nationwide gambling scene ended up the many years of deregulation and Reaganomics, Donald J. Trump and Alex P. Keaton, the première of “Life with the Loaded and Renowned” and also a remake of “Brewster’s Tens of millions.” Pastors were preaching the prosperity gospel; politicians were singing the praises from the unfettered free of charge market place. Out of the blue, Cohen writes, “it had been no longer taboo to gather a huge fortune; neither was it offensive to indicate it off. Prosperity—not the prosperity of blue-collar staff nevertheless the fortunes of their bosses—grew to become a means of reasserting the bounty of capitalism.”

The irony, as Cohen notes, is this obsession with unimaginable wealth, including the desire of hitting a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot, corresponded to your decline in money security for the majority of Operating persons. Beginning inside the nineteen-seventies and accelerating during the nineteen-eighties, the earnings gap amongst the loaded and the inadequate widened, task protection and pensions eroded, health and fitness-treatment expenditures and unemployment rose, and, for kids born in All those a long time, our extended-standing national promise—that education and effort would render them superior off than their moms and dads—ceased to become correct. Lifetime, mainly because it turned out, imitated the lottery: for some People in america, it absolutely was obtaining more challenging and more difficult to win.

The lottery was purported to make All of this greater, not even worse. Its advocates claimed that, by filling point out coffers without the need of growing state taxes, it could keep cash while in the pockets of ordinary citizens. But this premise, which led condition immediately after point out to approve lotteries, was simply just untrue. Proof from the first legalized lotteries swiftly put paid to the fantasy which they would supply adequate revenue to fund Significantly on the business enterprise of jogging a state. In New Jersey, where proponents experienced imagined proceeds over the get of numerous countless pounds, the lottery introduced in 30-3 million dollars in its to start with 12 months—about two for every cent in the condition’s income.

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When figures like that proved common in the era, legalization advocates, no longer in a position to provide the lottery to be a statewide silver bullet, ginned up other methods in its place, typically with the assistance of Scientific Games. Rather then argue that a lottery would float the vast majority of a state’s spending budget, they started claiming that it could address just one line product, invariably a authorities provider that was preferred and nonpartisan—most frequently training, but in some cases elder care or public parks or assist for veterans. 1 virtue of the narrower method was that it built campaigning for legalization uncomplicated. A vote for the lottery wasn't a technique for supporting gambling but a way of supporting veterans; a vote towards the lottery was a vote from education and learning.

These campaignsตรวจ หวย ล่าสุด were being terribly helpful but, just like the sooner types, fundamentally deceptive. For another thing, they, much too, wildly inflated the effects of lottery revenue on condition finances. In California, where by an S.G.I.-backed lottery initiative handed after a superior-profile marketing campaign touted it as being a boon for schoolchildren, the ensuing income covered, from the lottery’s very first year, about five for each cent from the condition instruction funds. As of the year, according to the California Section of Instruction, lottery income accounts for approximately one particular for each cent of all K-12 funding.

But that was not the worst of it. Time and again, instruction as well as other line things that served to persuade individuals to pass lottery proposals didn't essentially get any supplemental funding; in its place, the profits went to the state’s typical fund. Just after this occurred in California, other states mandated that lottery money move right into specified applications, but, as is so often the case, when a person loophole closes, Yet another a person opens. In Illinois, Florida, and Virginia, amid other states, the lottery profits did indeed go to a designated schooling fund—whereupon legislators offset Those people gains by decreasing the money coming in from common appropriations. Ultimately, Cohen writes, “the lottery supplanted, in lieu of supplemented, point out paying out on training.”

Right now, in accordance with the Countrywide Meeting of State Legislatures, lotteries usher in, on average, about just one per cent of condition revenue per annum. Like all money, it matters, but no matter what distinction it makes is offset by two complications. The primary is lotteries have created it tougher than previously to pass Considerably needed tax boosts, mainly because, thanks to a long time of noisy campaigning accompanied by decades of hefty advertising, the public wrongly thinks that universities along with other very important services are lavishly supported by gambling money. The next is that the funds raised by lotteries will come largely in the individuals who can minimum pay for to aspect with it. Every single point out lottery is regressive, which means that it will require a disproportionate toll on reduced-profits citizens. Rich folks do Participate in the lottery, obviously; among the biggest-ever Powerball jackpots, a quarter of a billion dollars, was received by a few asset administrators from Greenwich, Connecticut. But the rich obtain less tickets in comparison to the lousy (other than when jackpots technique ten figures); because of that and since their purchases represent a Considerably smaller sized share of their income, participating in the lottery incorporates a far more compact influence on their pocketbooks. The main difference is usually drastic: according to the client financial firm Bankrate, gamers earning greater than fifty thousand dollars annually commit, on normal, a person for every cent in their yearly cash flow on lottery tickets; People generating a lot less than thirty thousand dollars expend 13 per cent. Meaning anyone building twenty-7 thousand dollars loses some 30-five hundred bucks towards the lottery each year. To place that quantity in context, approximately sixty per cent of usa citizens have lower than a thousand bucks in savings.

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Defenders on the lottery sometimes cast it being a tax on the stupid, which means either that players don’t understand how unlikely They may be to acquire or they benefit from the match anyway. This suggests that lottery paying is a wholly individual as opposed to a partly structural selection, but In fact it is conscious of economic fluctuation; as Cohen writes, “Lottery sales maximize as incomes drop, unemployment grows, and poverty rates rise.” Just like all industrial products and solutions, lottery income also increase with exposure to promotion—and lottery items are most closely promoted in neighborhoods which can be disproportionately lousy, Black, or Latino. In Texas, where the minimal wage is $7.25, you can buy a fifty-dollar scratch-off ticket in a check-cashing location or get Powerball and Mega Tens of millions tickets, like Snickers bars, though purchasing groceries in a Dollar Common. Nor are point out lottery commissions above availing them selves with the psychology of addiction. Every thing regarding the lottery—from ad campaigns towards the glimpse on the entrance on the tickets and The maths driving them—is designed to hold gamers returning for more. None of this is particularly unique from the approaches of tobacco providers or video-sport makers. It just isn’t Ordinarily done underneath the auspices of The federal government.

In the ultimate web pages of “For the Dollar as well as a Dream,” Cohen, a good and meticulous collector of information, last but not least puts his thumb on the dimensions. Looking at the regressive character of state lotteries, their predatory tactics, their purpose in fostering gambling addictions, the way in which they discourage normal taxation, and their relatively modest money contributions, he concludes that they “shouldn't exist in the trendy United states of america.” As he acknowledges, this advice is unlikely to be taken anytime quickly; no condition has repealed its lottery in much more than 100 and 20-5 years. Still, he argues, we should function toward typical-sense reforms, including banning the sale of tickets on the web, capping the price of scratch-off tickets and the size of lotto jackpots, and, perhaps most important, closing a loophole that leaves lotteries exempt from File.T.C. regulation, and therefore free of charge from the constraints of truth of the matter-in-advertising and marketing legal guidelines.

What would occur if condition lotteries waned in impact or vanished entirely? Cohen undoubtedly overreaches when he claims that, “without the need of this type of blinding beacon, far more People may be willing to Consider critically with regard to the economic forces which have degraded access to social mobility and also have created it more difficult for people today to achieve monetary stability.” But he is right that governments in a very democratic Modern society need to be within the organization of improving the percentages, not rigging the sport, and there are far more equitable and efficient ways for your point out to employ its mighty powers to boost lifestyle for its citizens. Given that the California Lottery place it inside of a 2013 promoting marketing campaign, “Have confidence in anything larger.” ♦