what-weve-shed-actively playing-the-lottery

what-weve-shed-actively playing-the-lottery

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t my neighborhood usefulness retail store, and Just about undoubtedly at yours, also, it can be done to order upward of fifty various styles of scratch-off lottery tickets. To do so, you must be no less than eighteen years old, even though the tickets look like the décor to get a kindergarten classroom. The dominant themes are Main hues, dollar indicators, and glossy, as in gold bars, capturing stars, glinting horseshoes, and stacks of silver coins. When you find yourself taking a look at a solid wall of these, they also resemble—based upon the palette, font alternatives, and general flashy hecticness—the mid-nineties Online. Some of them are named for other video games, like the Monopoly X5, the Double Blackjack, as well as Spouse and children Feud, but most are uncomplicated about the point of buying them: Clearly show Me $10,000!, $one hundred,000 Blessed, Money Explosion, Income Is King, Blazing Hot Cash, Big Income Riches. In case your flavor operates toward Fast Ca£h or Purple Ball Funds Doubler, You should buy a single for only a buck; if you prefer VIP Club or $two,000,000 Gold Hurry, a single ticket will set you again thirty bucks. All of this is before you decide to get on the Decide 3, Decide on 4, Powerball, and Mega Thousands and thousands tickets, which happen to be comparatively staid in physical appearance—they appear like Scantron sheets—and so are printed out at time of acquire.

The strangest of the numerous Peculiar things about these tickets is, contrary to other advantage-store staples—Utz potato chips, Entenmann’s cinnamon-swirl buns, $1.ninety eight bottles of wine—They are really brought to you by your condition govt. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah will not be while in the company of selling lottery tickets. All over the place else, Blazing Very hot Hard cash and its ilk are, like point out parks and driver’s licenses, a governing administration services.

How this came being is the topic of a wonderful new e book, “For just a Greenback in addition to a Aspiration: Condition Lotteries in Contemporary America,” from the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the center of Cohen’s reserve can be a peculiar contradiction: on the just one hand, the lottery is vastly fewer rewarding than its proponents ensure it is out to get, a deception which has occur at the price of community coffers and community expert services. Alternatively, it is so preferred that it's the two very rewarding to the non-public businesses which make and promote tickets and economically crippling for its most dedicated players. 1 in two American Older people buys a lottery ticket a minimum of annually, one in 4 purchases just one at the least once a month, and probably the most avid gamers get them at charges That may shock you. At my regional keep, some customers snap up overall rolls—in a least, 300 dollars’ really worth of tickets—and Other people exhibit up each morning, Engage in right until they get a thing, then come back within the evening and do it once more. All this, repeated every day at grocery stores and liquor merchants and mini-marts across the nation, renders the lottery a ninety-a single-billion-dollar business. “Us residents invest additional on lottery tickets annually than on cigarettes, espresso, or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “plus they devote more on lottery tickets yearly than on video clip streaming companies, concert tickets, guides, and movie tickets mixed.”

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As Those people two sets of comparisons propose, lottery tickets can seem like both a benign method of entertainment or simply a hazardous habit. The problem that lurks within just “To get a Greenback along with a Aspiration” is which class they genuinely belong to—and, appropriately, no matter if governments billed with advertising and marketing the general welfare should be during the company of producing them, publicizing them, and profiting from them.

Lotteries are an historical pastime. They had been frequent within the Roman Empire—Nero was a enthusiast of these; make of that what you can—and they are attested to through the entire Bible, the place the casting of lots is used for all the things from picking the following king of Israel to selecting who will get to keep Jesus’ clothes once the Crucifixion. In several of these early occasions, they have been deployed both as being a style of party sport—during Roman Saturnalias, tickets have been dispersed totally free to attendees, a few of whom received extravagant prizes—or as a method of divining God’s will. Often, though, lotteries were being structured to lift revenue for public operates. The earliest regarded Edition of keno dates for the Han dynasty and is claimed to own aided buy The nice Wall of China. Two generations afterwards, Caesar Augustus started out a lottery to subsidize repairs for town of Rome.

Through the fourteen-hundreds, the practice was frequent in the Low International locations, which relied on lotteries to create town fortifications and, later on, to deliver charity for that bad. Shortly sufficient, the trend built its solution to England, wherever, in 1567, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the nation’s very first lottery, designating its income for “reparation of the Havens and power of your Realme.” Tickets cost ten shillings, a hefty sum again then, and, In combination with the possible prize value, every one served as a get-out-of-jail-no cost card, virtually; just about every lottery participant was entitled to immunity from arrest, aside from certain felonies which include piracy, murder, and treason.

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The lottery did not so much spread to America from England as assistance unfold England into The us: the European settlement in the continent was financed partially as a result of lotteries. They then became widespread during the colonies them selves, Irrespective of sturdy Protestant proscriptions towards gambling. From the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which held its first approved lottery in 1745, dice and playing cards ended up forbidden even in personal homes.

That contradiction could be spelled out in part by exigency; regardless of what its moral bent, early America was small on revenue and extensive on the need for public is effective. With time, In addition, it grew to become, as Cohen notes, “outlined politically by its aversion to taxation.” That designed the lottery an pleasing different for increasing cash, which was useful for funding every little thing from civil protection to the construction of church buildings. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were all financed partly by lotteries, as well as Continental Congress attempted to use 1 to assist purchase the Groundbreaking War. (Lotteries formed a rare place of arrangement in between Thomas Jefferson, who regarded them as not Substantially riskier than farming, and Alexander Hamilton, who grasped what would develop into their essence: that everybody “would favor a small chance of winning an awesome deal to a terrific probability of successful very little.”) And, like almost almost everything else in early America, lotteries were snarled With all the slave trade, sometimes in unpredictable techniques. George Washington once managed a Virginia-based lottery whose prizes provided human beings, and one particular previously enslaved man, Denmark Vesey, obtained his freedom following winning a South Carolina lottery and went on to foment a slave rebellion.

This initial era on the American lottery was introduced to an finish by widespread issue about mismanagement and malfeasance. Between 1833 and 1880, every point out but 1 banned the practice, leaving just the infamously corrupt Louisiana Condition Lottery Company in operation. Inspite of its title, the L.S.L.C. correctly operated across the nation, sending commercials and providing tickets by mail. So impressive was it that, as Cohen explains, it took the federal govt to kill it off; in 1890, Congress handed a legislation prohibiting the interstate promotion or sale of lottery tickets, therefore devastating the Louisiana activity and, In the interim, Placing a prevent to condition lotteries in the united states.

Predictably, in the absence of lawful lotteries, illegal ones flourished—earlier mentioned all, quantities games, which awarded daily prizes for accurately guessing A 3-digit amount. In order to avoid allegations that the game was set, every single day’s winning selection was based on a publicly readily available but constantly modifying source, including the amount of cash traded around the New York Inventory Exchange. Numbers online games ended up enormously well-liked almost everywhere—in 1964, they raked in two hundred million pounds, about two billion in nowadays’s income, in Ny city by yourself—but Primarily so in Black communities, the place they offered a Substantially needed source of money. This was correct typically for his or her organizers and runners, whose ranks integrated Ella Fitzgerald and Malcolm X, but once in a while also for gamers who lucked into a windfall, for example Luther Theophilus Powell, who won ten thousand bucks on a 20-five greenback guess inside the nineteen-fifties and used it to obtain a home in Queens for his spouse, daughter, and young son, Colin Powell.

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At some point, numbers video games proved so worthwhile that they were taken around by arranged crime, in some cases With all the aid of police officers who accepted bribes to shut down African American operators. Dutch Schultz and Vito Genovese both of those utilised the game to aid bankroll their functions, as well as the Winter Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger’s crew, obtained its commence partly by managing figures in Somerville, outside the house Boston. Through the nineteen-fifties, escalating problem regarding the electric power and get to with the Mob culminated in the Senate investigation, the Kefauver committee, which judged earnings from gambling being the first economical motor of crime syndicates in the united states. This declaration, plus the torrent of news coverage it generated, had a paradoxical effect: it designed lottery games appear to be so profitable that, right after many years of dismissing them as inappropriate to the honorable small business of public service, condition governments once again began to consider having in over the get.

It is actually at this stage that Cohen’s narrative truly receives heading; Even though he nods towards the early record of the lottery, he focusses mainly on its fashionable incarnation. This started out, he argues, when growing awareness about all the money to get made in the gambling small business collided having a crisis in state funding. While in the nineteen-sixties, underneath the load of a swelling population, increasing inflation, and the cost of the Vietnam War, The us’s prosperity started to wane. For many states, In particular people who supplied a generous social safety Web, balancing the spending plan grew to become ever more hard with no possibly boosting taxes or slicing products and services. The difficulty was that each choices had been extremely unpopular with voters.

For politicians confronting this issue, the lottery appeared to be a great Option: a way to take care of existing products and services without the need of climbing taxes—and so without having finding punished within the polls. For them, Cohen writes, lotteries were being effectively “budgetary miracles, the prospect for states to make profits seem seemingly away from slender air.” For illustration, in New Jersey, which had no gross sales tax, no income tax, and no appetite for instituting possibly one, legislators claimed that a lottery would usher in numerous millions of bucks, thus relieving them of the necessity to ever all over again contemplate the unpleasant topic of taxation.

Dismissing prolonged-standing moral objections to your lottery, these new advocates reasoned that, considering the fact that persons ended up about to gamble in any case, the point out may also pocket the revenue. That argument experienced its restrictions—by its logic, governments must also sell heroin—nonetheless it gave ethical include to people that accredited of lotteries for other explanations. Several white voters, Cohen writes, supported legalization because they assumed condition-operate gambling would largely catch the attention of Black figures gamers, who would then foot the Invoice for expert services that All those white voters didn’t choose to buy anyway, such as better faculties in the city parts they'd these days fled. (In reality, the oft-repeated assert that legalizing the lottery would basically decriminalize current gamblers as an alternative to generate new ones of all races proved significantly Mistaken.) In the meantime, quite a few African American voters supported legalization since they thought that it could ease their friction Using the police, for whom figures games had long served like a motive—from time to time respectable, in some cases not—to interrogate and imprison individuals of color.

Lottery opponents, on the other hand, questioned both the ethics of funding general public expert services by way of gambling and also the amount of money that states actually stood to get. These types of critics hailed from each side on the political aisle and all walks of lifetime, but essentially the most vociferous of them have been devout Protestants, who regarded govt-sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable. (Catholics, In contrast, have been overwhelmingly Professional-lottery, played it in huge figures as soon as it had been legalized, and reliably flocked to other gambling video games in addition; Cohen cites the staggering indisputable fact that, in 1978, “bingo online games hosted by Ohio Catholic significant educational facilities took in extra money compared to state’s lottery.”) As a single Methodist minister and anti-lottery activist declared at the time, “There may be additional settlement among the Protestant teams within the adverse outcome of gambling than on some other social challenge, such as the issues of abortion, Liquor, and homosexuality.” This kind of adverse outcomes integrated fostering gambling addictions, sapping cash flow in the bad, undermining basic civic and moral ideals by championing a path to prosperity that did not include merit or labor, and encouraging point out governments To maximise gains even for the price in their most vulnerable citizens.

Nonetheless legitimate these fears may have been, they had been largely ignored. In 1964, New Hampshire, famously tax averse, authorized the very first point out-run lottery of the fashionable period. Thirteen states followed in as many years, all of them in the Northeast as well as Rust Belt. Meanwhile, as Cohen recounts, the nation’s late-twentieth-century tax revolt intensified. In 1978, California handed Proposition thirteen, chopping residence taxes by Just about sixty for every cent and inspiring other states to abide by suit; in the early nineteen-eighties, with Ronald Reagan while in the White Property, federal dollars flowing into point out coffers declined. With An increasing number of states casting around for solutions for their budgetary crises which would not enrage an significantly anti-tax electorate, the enchantment of the lottery distribute south and west.

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As Cohen relates in Probably the most interesting chapter of his ebook, Individuals Professional-lottery forces had a powerful ally in Scientific Online games, Inc., a lottery-ticket producer that initially designed a name for alone by groundbreaking scratch-off tickets. In combination with delivering prompt final results, these tickets, like Ikea household furniture, offer the attraction of Energetic participation, which supplies gamers the illusion of working out some Management more than the end result. Scratch-off tickets débuted to wonderful accomplishment in Massachusetts in 1974; by 1976, each individual state lottery had jumped on the bandwagon. But that triumph offered a dilemma for Scientific Online games, since it meant the available marketplace was saturated. To maintain expanding its business, the corporate established about persuading a lot more states to legalize the lottery. Starting off inside the late seventies, S.G.I. commenced hiring lobbyists, contracting with advertising and marketing firms, developing astroturf citizens’ teams, and investing a lot of bucks to persuade voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, as well as District of Columbia to pass lottery initiatives.

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Scientific Video games wasn't the sole firm supplying lottery services, but its opponents had mostly eschewed lobbying, nominally away from moral concerns but actually since they have been hesitant to invest funds they wouldn’t recoup if they didn’t land the ensuing contracts. S.G.I. acquired around this problems by making sure the lottery initiatives it backed contained language—allegedly intended to avert the involvement of arranged criminal offense—that required comprehensive money disclosures don't just from all of the executives at corporations distributing a bid but from each of the executives at their mum or dad businesses, too. That prerequisite on your own built the bidding course of action also burdensome to be worthwhile for S.G.I.’s chief competitor, Webcraft Game titles, since it was owned by Beatrice Foods, which at enough time was larger than Lockheed Martin, 3M, and Coca-Cola. The S.G.I.-supported initiatives also mandated restricted timelines for that bidding procedure, providing the corporation a planning edge although which makes it almost difficult for anybody else to finish the paperwork in time.

On the other hand dodgy this tactic may perhaps are, it labored. Each individual lottery initiative backed by S.G.I. succeeded—and, in every single scenario, the business was rewarded having a contract. That intended its lobbying expense paid out off, spectacularly; in California, By way of example, S.G.I. used $two.four million to move a lottery initiative, then won the resulting forty-million-greenback agreement. Wins like that before long turned Scientific Video games into an unstoppable force inside the lottery business. By 1982, the business experienced printed its 5-billionth ticket and was generating one million much more every hour. At the same time, the lottery marketplace by itself experienced grow to be unstoppable, far too—as a result of S.G.I. as well as wave of legalizations, but also thanks to the introduction of the new version of an extremely previous recreation of prospect that, as Cohen writes, “essentially reshaped the put of lotteries in American Modern society.”

Based on a betting recreation initially played in seventeenth-century Genoa, lotto is just not self-evidently groundbreaking—or, for instance, self-evidently desirable. To Participate in, you guess a certain quantity of numbers from a specified array. The Big apple Lotto, As an illustration, involves 6 quantities concerning one and fifty-9; the North Carolina lotto, 5 figures amongst just one and forty-3. The odds of obtaining all of the quantities suitable are absurdly very low—which, paradoxically, is why lotto revolutionized the sector.

Before the activity was launched, state jackpots ended up comparatively modest. Their size was minimal by the number of gamers, given that payouts mirrored a share of ticket product sales, and by state lottery commissions, which set a cap within the prize dollars; from 1964 to 1979, jackpots rarely exceeded one million dollars. But lotto was a rollover sport: if a drawing was held and nobody won—a common event, provided the chances—players could maintain getting tickets. For all those profiting from your lottery, this produced a virtuous cycle. Each time the pot got bigger, more and more people had been tempted to buy a ticket, as well as more people acquired tickets, the bigger the pot turned.

The entire detail was massively counterintuitive—the even worse the odds of winning grew to become, the more and more people wished to Participate in. Alexander Hamilton was ideal: to the standard man or woman, the distinction between a person-in-a few-million odds and a person-in-3-hundred-million odds didn’t make any difference, although the difference between A 3-million-dollar jackpot and A 3-hundred-million-greenback jackpot mattered enormously. Recognizing this, lottery commissioners began lifting prize caps and including more figures—say, 6 away from fifty as opposed to five outside of thirty—As a result generating the likelihood of profitable even more compact. The New York Lotto released, in 1978, with one particular-in-3.8-million odds; today, the percentages are a single in forty-5 million.

Even with All of this, and to the despair of statisticians just about everywhere, lotto before long became the nation’s most widely used lottery sport. But While ticket sales and prize winnings soared, they did not achieve this equally across the country, considering that rollover jackpots disproportionately benefitted states with significant populations and therefore much more prospective players. In reaction, lesser states banded alongside one another to variety multistate lotteries, a craze that culminated in Powerball and Mega Thousands and thousands, Each and every of which started out as being a collaboration among the a handful of states but has become played all over the place the lottery is lawful. The resulting prizes are definitely astronomical; this past July, two folks who acquired a lottery ticket in Illinois bucked a single-in-3-hundred-and-two-million odds to win a $1.34-billion Mega Thousands and thousands jackpot.

In certain respects, the trendy American lotto sport is a product of technological adjust; it couldn't have existed previous to computer applications that enabled states to learn roughly instantaneously no matter if everyone experienced obtained a ticket With all the winning quantities. But Cohen would make a persuasive situation that it absolutely was also a product of cultural change: the tip of the shared reverence for middle-course stability as well as rise, during the nineteen-eighties, on the veneration of extravagant prosperity. The many years where lotto reshaped the national gambling scene had been the decades of deregulation and Reaganomics, Donald J. Trump and Alex P. Keaton, the première of “Lifestyles in the Abundant and Well known” and a remake of “Brewster’s Hundreds of thousands.” Pastors had been preaching the prosperity gospel; politicians had been singing the praises in the unfettered cost-free market place. Out of the blue, Cohen writes, “it was no longer taboo to gather an enormous fortune; neither was it offensive to show it off. Prosperity—not the prosperity of blue-collar employees but the fortunes of their bosses—turned a way of reasserting the bounty of capitalism.”

The irony, as Cohen notes, is this obsession with unimaginable wealth, such as the desire of hitting a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot, corresponded to your decline in fiscal stability for many Doing the job folks. Commencing during the nineteen-seventies and accelerating inside the nineteen-eighties, the income hole among the loaded and the poor widened, occupation protection and pensions eroded, well being-treatment expenditures and unemployment rose, and, for youngsters born in People a long time, our extensive-standing countrywide promise—that instruction and effort would render them better off than their parents—ceased to be true. Lifestyle, since it turned out, imitated the lottery: for the majority of Us residents, it absolutely was getting tougher and tougher to acquire.

The lottery was alleged to make All of this much better, not even worse. Its advocates claimed that, by filling point out coffers with no escalating condition taxes, it would hold cash from the pockets of ordinary citizens. But this premise, which led point out after point out to approve lotteries, was simply untrue. Proof from the initial legalized lotteries speedily place paid towards the fantasy that they would provide adequate cash flow to fund Considerably of your company of functioning a condition. In New Jersey, where proponents had imagined proceeds over the order of many hundreds of an incredible number of pounds, the lottery introduced in 30-three million dollars in its initial 12 months—about two for each cent of your point out’s revenue.

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When figures like that proved typical of the period, legalization advocates, not in a position to promote the lottery as being a statewide silver bullet, ginned up other strategies in its place, typically with the help of Scientific Online games. As opposed to argue that a lottery would float the majority of a condition’s budget, they started saying that it would protect only one line item, invariably a federal government company which was popular and nonpartisan—most often training, but often elder care or public parks or aid for veterans. A single virtue of the narrower solution was that it designed campaigning for legalization quick. A vote for that lottery was not a way of supporting gambling but a technique for supporting veterans; a vote from the lottery was a vote in opposition to education.

These strategiesหวย หุ้น had been extraordinarily efficient but, just like the sooner types, fundamentally deceptive. For something, they, way too, wildly inflated the effect of lottery cash on point out finances. In California, exactly where an S.G.I.-backed lottery initiative handed after a high-profile campaign touted it as a boon for schoolchildren, the resulting earnings lined, within the lottery’s to start with year, about 5 for every cent of your state training budget. As of this calendar year, based on the California Department of Education, lottery revenue accounts for roughly a single per cent of all K-twelve funding.

But that was not the worst of it. Repeatedly, schooling and also other line merchandise that served to steer people to go lottery proposals didn't truly get any extra funding; rather, the revenue went in to the state’s common fund. Right after this transpired in California, other states mandated that lottery revenue stream instantly into specified applications, but, as is so generally the situation, when just one loophole closes, An additional a person opens. In Illinois, Florida, and Virginia, among the other states, the lottery profits did without a doubt go to a selected education and learning fund—whereupon legislators offset Individuals gains by decreasing The cash coming in from normal appropriations. In the end, Cohen writes, “the lottery supplanted, instead of supplemented, condition expending on education.”

Right now, according to the National Conference of Point out Legislatures, lotteries usher in, on normal, about one for every cent of point out income each year. Like all funds, it matters, but what ever distinction it makes is offset by two issues. The first is always that lotteries have made it more difficult than in the past to go A lot essential tax boosts, because, due to a long time of noisy campaigning followed by many years of large marketing, the general public wrongly thinks that educational facilities and also other critical solutions are lavishly supported by gambling funds. The second is that the cash raised by lotteries comes mainly within the individuals that can least afford to aspect with it. Each individual state lottery is regressive, this means that it requires a disproportionate toll on low-revenue citizens. Loaded folks do Enjoy the lottery, of course; among the most important-at any time Powerball jackpots, 1 / 4 of the billion dollars, was won by 3 asset administrators from Greenwich, Connecticut. But the rich invest in less tickets in comparison to the lousy (besides when jackpots strategy 10 figures); thanks to that and because their buys constitute a A lot lesser proportion in their earnings, participating in the lottery incorporates a considerably smaller sized influence on their pocketbooks. The main difference is often drastic: in accordance with the customer fiscal enterprise Bankrate, gamers making a lot more than fifty thousand bucks every year shell out, on ordinary, one for every cent in their annual revenue on lottery tickets; Individuals creating lower than 30 thousand bucks invest 13 for each cent. That means anyone generating twenty-7 thousand pounds loses some thirty-5 hundred dollars into the lottery annually. To put that variety in context, almost sixty for each cent of usa citizens have lower than a thousand bucks in savings.

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Defenders with the lottery sometimes cast it like a tax to the Silly, this means possibly that gamers don’t know how not likely These are to gain or which they take pleasure in the video game anyway. This suggests that lottery paying is a wholly personal rather than a partly structural conclusion, but The truth is it truly is responsive to financial fluctuation; as Cohen writes, “Lottery product sales increase as incomes slide, unemployment grows, and poverty rates increase.” Just like all industrial products and solutions, lottery product sales also boost with exposure to promoting—and lottery merchandise are most seriously promoted in neighborhoods which can be disproportionately very poor, Black, or Latino. In Texas, exactly where the least wage is $seven.twenty five, You should purchase a fifty-greenback scratch-off ticket in a Verify-cashing venue or pick up Powerball and Mega Hundreds of thousands tickets, like Snickers bars, though purchasing groceries in a Greenback Typical. Nor are state lottery commissions over availing on their own in the psychology of addiction. Every thing in regards to the lottery—from ad strategies on the search in the front of the tickets and The maths driving them—is made to continue to keep players coming back For additional. None of the is especially distinct within the methods of tobacco corporations or online video-recreation suppliers. It just isn’t normally carried out under the auspices of the government.

In the ultimate internet pages of “For a Greenback in addition to a Desire,” Cohen, a fair and meticulous collector of data, lastly places his thumb on the size. Looking at the regressive mother nature of point out lotteries, their predatory procedures, their part in fostering gambling addictions, the way in which they discourage normal taxation, as well as their comparatively modest monetary contributions, he concludes they “should not exist in the fashionable United states of america.” As he acknowledges, this recommendation is not going to become taken whenever shortly; no point out has repealed its lottery in greater than a hundred and twenty-five years. Even now, he argues, we must always do the job towards common-perception reforms, like banning the sale of tickets on-line, capping the cost 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 in the constraints of truth-in-promotion legislation.

What would come about if state lotteries waned in affect or vanished altogether? Cohen absolutely overreaches when he claims that, “devoid of this kind of blinding beacon, far more Americans could possibly be willing to Assume critically with regards to the financial forces that have degraded entry to social mobility and also have built it harder for persons to achieve financial security.” But he is true that governments inside of a democratic Culture really should be from the small business of strengthening the odds, not rigging the sport, and that there are far more equitable and helpful approaches for the condition to make use of its mighty powers to boost lifestyle for its citizens. As being the California Lottery put it within a 2013 promotion marketing campaign, “Believe in one thing more substantial.” ♦