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t my local benefit shop, and Virtually surely at yours, much too, it is feasible to purchase upward of fifty unique types of scratch-off lottery tickets. To do so, you have to be a minimum of eighteen a long time outdated, Despite the fact that the tickets look like the décor for just a kindergarten classroom. The dominant themes are Key colors, dollar indicators, and shiny, as in gold bars, shooting stars, glinting horseshoes, and stacks of silver coins. When you're taking a look at a good wall of these, In addition they resemble—based upon the palette, font decisions, and normal flashy hecticness—the mid-nineties Internet. A number of them are named for other online games, such as the Monopoly X5, the Double Blackjack, and also the Loved ones Feud, but most are straightforward about The purpose of buying them: Present Me $ten,000!, $a hundred,000 Fortunate, Income Explosion, Income Is King, Blazing Sizzling Hard cash, Big Hard cash Riches. In the event your taste runs toward Quick Ca$h or Crimson Ball Cash Doubler, you can buy 1 for simply a buck; if you prefer VIP Club or $2,000,000 Gold Hurry, just one ticket will established you back thirty bucks. All this is before you get for the Choose three, Choose four, Powerball, and Mega Tens of millions tickets, that happen to be comparatively staid in overall look—they appear like Scantron sheets—and therefore are printed out at time of acquire.

The strangest of the numerous Bizarre issues about these tickets is the fact that, unlike other advantage-retailer staples—Utz potato chips, Entenmann’s cinnamon-swirl buns, $one.ninety eight bottles of wine—They may be brought for you by your point out governing administration. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah aren't in the company of promoting lottery tickets. Just about everywhere else, Blazing Hot Dollars and its ilk are, like point out parks and driver’s licenses, a governing administration company.

How this arrived being is the topic of a fantastic new reserve, “For just a Dollar in addition to a Desire: Point out Lotteries in Fashionable America,” via the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s guide is usually a peculiar contradiction: on the one particular hand, the lottery is vastly fewer lucrative than its proponents ensure it is out to generally be, a deception that has occur within the cost of public coffers and general public companies. On the flip side, it's so popular that it's both equally particularly profitable for that personal firms which make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most focused players. One particular in two American Grown ups buys a lottery ticket a minimum of once a year, one particular in 4 buys just one not less than once a month, and by far the most avid players acquire them at prices Which may shock you. At my local keep, some buyers snap up entire rolls—in a least, three hundred dollars’ truly worth of tickets—and Some others present up in the morning, Participate in until finally they acquire anything, then come back inside the night and get it done all over again. All of this, repeated each day at grocery retailers and liquor suppliers and mini-marts across the nation, renders the lottery a ninety-a single-billion-greenback business. “People devote more on lottery tickets annually than on cigarettes, espresso, or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “and they devote more on lottery tickets every year than on movie streaming services, live performance tickets, textbooks, and movie tickets put together.”

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As those two sets of comparisons advise, lottery tickets can look like both a benign type of amusement or possibly a risky dependancy. The dilemma that lurks within “For the Dollar in addition to a Desire” is which class they actually belong to—and, accordingly, regardless of whether governments billed with endorsing the overall welfare ought to be from the small business of producing them, publicizing them, and profiting from them.

Lotteries are an historic pastime. They were being frequent while in the Roman Empire—Nero was a enthusiast of them; make of that what you might—and they are attested to all through the Bible, wherever the casting of lots is utilized for anything from deciding upon the subsequent king of Israel to selecting who will get to maintain Jesus’ garments once the Crucifixion. In lots of of these early scenarios, they ended up deployed either to be a sort of celebration activity—through Roman Saturnalias, tickets had been distributed no cost to friends, many of whom won extravagant prizes—or as a way of divining God’s will. Generally, though, lotteries had been organized to raise funds for community will work. The earliest recognised Variation of keno dates into the Han dynasty and is alleged to have aided pay for The nice Wall of China. Two hundreds of years later on, Caesar Augustus began a lottery to subsidize repairs for the city of Rome.

From the fourteen-hundreds, the exercise was widespread while in the Reduced Countries, which relied on lotteries to create town fortifications and, later, to provide charity with the inadequate. Soon ample, the pattern manufactured its solution to England, where by, in 1567, Queen Elizabeth I chartered the nation’s very first lottery, designating its earnings for “reparation with the Havens and power in the Realme.” Tickets cost ten shillings, a significant sum back then, and, Besides the possible prize price, each served for a get-out-of-jail-free of charge card, pretty much; each individual lottery participant was entitled to immunity from arrest, except for particular felonies for instance piracy, murder, and treason.

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The lottery did not much spread to The us from England as aid distribute England into The usa: the European settlement with the continent was financed partially by lotteries. They then became prevalent inside the colonies by themselves, In spite of solid Protestant proscriptions against gambling. Inside the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which held its initially licensed lottery in 1745, dice and playing cards were forbidden even in private homes.

That contradiction can be defined in part by exigency; whatever its ethical bent, early The usa was limited on income and lengthy on the necessity for community functions. As time passes, Additionally, it turned, as Cohen notes, “defined politically by its aversion to taxation.” That manufactured the lottery an interesting different for raising cash, which was employed for funding all the things from civil defense to the development of churches. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were all financed partly by lotteries, and the Continental Congress tried to utilize one that will help pay for the Revolutionary War. (Lotteries formed a unusual place of settlement between Thomas Jefferson, who regarded them as not A lot riskier than farming, and Alexander Hamilton, who grasped what would turn into their essence: that everyone “would favor a little potential for winning a great offer to a fantastic chance of successful tiny.”) And, like Nearly every thing else in early The us, lotteries had been tousled Together with the slave trade, sometimes in unpredictable approaches. George Washington as soon as managed a Virginia-based mostly lottery whose prizes included human beings, and a single formerly enslaved male, Denmark Vesey, purchased his freedom following successful a South Carolina lottery and went on to foment a slave rebellion.

This Preliminary era from the American lottery was brought to an end by popular worry about mismanagement and malfeasance. Amongst 1833 and 1880, just about every condition but a single banned the practice, leaving just the infamously corrupt Louisiana State Lottery Company in operation. Regardless of its identify, the L.S.L.C. efficiently operated across the nation, sending ads and advertising tickets by mail. So strong was it that, as Cohen explains, it took the federal govt to get rid of it off; in 1890, Congress passed a law prohibiting the interstate marketing or sale of lottery tickets, therefore devastating the Louisiana game and, In the meanwhile, putting a end to point out lotteries in the usa.

Predictably, in the absence of legal lotteries, illegal types flourished—earlier mentioned all, figures video games, which awarded everyday prizes for effectively guessing A 3-digit quantity. To avoid allegations that the game was fastened, every day’s successful number was determined by a publicly out there but continually switching supply, like the amount of money traded on the Big apple Stock Trade. Numbers game titles ended up enormously preferred everywhere—in 1964, they raked in two hundred million bucks, about two billion in right now’s funds, in Ny city by yourself—but Specially so in Black communities, exactly where they supplied a Significantly wanted source of money. This was legitimate mostly for his or her organizers and runners, whose ranks incorporated Ella Fitzgerald and Malcolm X, but at times also for gamers who lucked into a windfall, like Luther Theophilus Powell, who gained 10 thousand dollars over a 20-5 greenback bet while in the nineteen-fifties and utilized it to order a house in Queens for his wife, daughter, and young son, Colin Powell.

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Inevitably, quantities game titles proved so financially rewarding which they were taken about by structured crime, at times Together with the aid of law enforcement officers who accepted bribes to shut down African American operators. Dutch Schultz and Vito Genovese both of those utilised the sport to help you bankroll their functions, as well as the Wintertime Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger’s crew, got its start off partly by functioning numbers in Somerville, exterior Boston. Via the nineteen-fifties, increasing issue with regard to the power and access from the Mob culminated inside of a Senate investigation, the Kefauver committee, which judged revenue from gambling for being the primary monetary motor of criminal offense syndicates in America. This declaration, and also the torrent of news coverage it generated, experienced a paradoxical effect: it made lottery games look so worthwhile that, immediately after a long time of dismissing them as inappropriate to the honorable organization of public service, condition governments Once more commenced to think about having in to the get.

It is at this time that Cohen’s narrative truly will get likely; Despite the fact that he nods to the early historical past of your lottery, he focusses chiefly on its present day incarnation. This begun, he argues, when expanding consciousness about all the money being built in the gambling enterprise collided by using a crisis in state funding. Within the nineteen-sixties, under the stress of the swelling population, increasing inflation, and the cost of the Vietnam War, The us’s prosperity began to wane. For a lot of states, Particularly the ones that furnished a generous social security Web, balancing the finances became significantly challenging without both increasing taxes or cutting expert services. The issue was that the two solutions were incredibly unpopular with voters.

For politicians confronting this issue, the lottery seemed to be a wonderful solution: a way to maintain present solutions without having climbing taxes—and so with no receiving punished with the polls. For them, Cohen writes, lotteries had been basically “budgetary miracles, the prospect for states to help make profits look seemingly from thin air.” As an illustration, in New Jersey, which experienced no profits tax, no money tax, and no hunger for instituting either one particular, legislators claimed that a lottery would usher in hundreds of countless bucks, thus relieving them of the necessity to at any time once again ponder the unpleasant matter of taxation.

Dismissing extensive-standing moral objections to your lottery, these new advocates reasoned that, given that folks were likely to gamble in any case, the state could possibly at the same time pocket the profits. That argument had its restrictions—by its logic, governments must also provide heroin—but it really gave moral address to people who permitted of lotteries for other reasons. Quite a few white voters, Cohen writes, supported legalization simply because they considered point out-operate gambling would primarily entice Black numbers players, who'd then foot the Monthly bill for services that These white voters didn’t need to pay for in any case, which include improved educational facilities during the urban locations that they had recently fled. (In reality, the oft-recurring claim that legalizing the lottery would just decriminalize existing gamblers as opposed to build new ones of all races proved radically Improper.) In the meantime, many African American voters supported legalization given that they thought that it could ease their friction With all the law enforcement, for whom figures online games experienced extensive served to be a purpose—at times genuine, at times not—to interrogate and imprison men and women of colour.

Lottery opponents, nonetheless, questioned each the ethics of funding public products and services by gambling along with the amount of money that states seriously stood to achieve. These types of critics hailed from each side with the political aisle and all walks of lifetime, but one of the most vociferous of these were devout Protestants, who regarded federal government-sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable. (Catholics, Against this, have been overwhelmingly Professional-lottery, played it in huge numbers when it was legalized, and reliably flocked to other gambling online games likewise; Cohen cites the staggering undeniable fact that, in 1978, “bingo game titles hosted by Ohio Catholic significant schools took in more cash as opposed to state’s lottery.”) As a person Methodist minister and anti-lottery activist declared at time, “There's extra agreement amid Protestant teams on the adverse result of gambling than on another social problem, including the issues of abortion, Liquor, and homosexuality.” These adverse consequences bundled fostering gambling addictions, sapping income in the inadequate, undermining simple civic and moral beliefs by championing a path to prosperity that did not include advantage or exertions, and encouraging state governments to maximize revenue even with the expense in their most vulnerable citizens.

However legitimate these issues might need been, they have been mainly dismissed. In 1964, New Hampshire, famously tax averse, authorised the initial point out-operate lottery of the modern era. 13 states adopted in as a few years, all of these inside the Northeast plus the Rust Belt. Meanwhile, as Cohen recounts, the country’s late-twentieth-century tax revolt intensified. In 1978, California passed Proposition thirteen, cutting home taxes by Virtually sixty for each cent and inspiring other states to comply with go well with; during the early nineteen-eighties, with Ronald Reagan during the White Dwelling, federal revenue flowing into point out coffers declined. With Increasingly more states casting around for solutions for their budgetary crises which would not enrage an significantly anti-tax electorate, the attractiveness in the lottery distribute south and west.

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As Cohen relates in perhaps the most intriguing chapter of his reserve, Individuals Professional-lottery forces experienced a robust ally in Scientific Games, Inc., a lottery-ticket maker that initial built a name for by itself by pioneering scratch-off tickets. In addition to delivering instantaneous benefits, these tickets, like Ikea home furniture, supply the charm of active participation, which gives players the illusion of training some Regulate in excess of the outcome. Scratch-off tickets débuted to wonderful accomplishment in Massachusetts in 1974; by 1976, each condition lottery had jumped about the bandwagon. But that triumph offered an issue for Scientific Video games, as it intended the readily available current market was saturated. To help keep increasing its enterprise, the corporate set about persuading additional states to legalize the lottery. Setting up during the late seventies, S.G.I. commenced employing lobbyists, contracting with advertising corporations, creating astroturf citizens’ groups, and paying a lot of pounds to influence voters in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Oregon, as well as the District of Columbia to pass lottery initiatives.

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Scientific Online games wasn't the only real company providing lottery providers, but its rivals experienced mainly eschewed lobbying, nominally outside of moral worries but genuinely as they have been unwilling to spend revenue they wouldn’t recoup if they didn’t land the resulting contracts. S.G.I. obtained close to this issue by ensuring the lottery initiatives it backed contained language—allegedly meant to reduce the involvement of organized crime—that expected substantial financial disclosures not merely from many of the executives at businesses submitting a bid but from the many executives at their guardian corporations, far too. That prerequisite on your own manufactured the bidding approach also burdensome for being worthwhile for S.G.I.’s chief competitor, Webcraft Online games, because it was owned by Beatrice Foods, which at time was greater than Lockheed Martin, 3M, and Coca-Cola. The S.G.I.-supported initiatives also mandated limited timelines for that bidding method, giving the business a arranging edge even though which makes it nearly unattainable for anybody else to finish the paperwork in time.

Nonetheless dodgy this technique may perhaps are already, it worked. Just about every lottery initiative backed by S.G.I. succeeded—and, in each and every circumstance, the corporate was rewarded having a deal. That intended its lobbying expense compensated off, spectacularly; in California, As an example, S.G.I. spent $2.four million to pass a lottery initiative, then received the resulting forty-million-greenback contract. Wins like that before long turned Scientific Game titles into an unstoppable pressure in the lottery marketplace. By 1982, the business experienced printed its five-billionth ticket and was making one million a lot more each hour. At the same time, the lottery market by itself experienced develop into unstoppable, much too—thanks to S.G.I. and also the wave of legalizations, but additionally thanks to the introduction of a new edition of an exceptionally outdated recreation of likelihood that, as Cohen writes, “fundamentally reshaped the place of lotteries in American Culture.”

Depending on a betting sport at first played in seventeenth-century Genoa, lotto is not really self-evidently groundbreaking—or, for that matter, self-evidently appealing. To Enjoy, you guess a specific quantity of figures from the specified variety. The The big apple Lotto, For example, calls for 6 figures concerning 1 and fifty-nine; the North Carolina lotto, five numbers amongst a person and forty-a few. The percentages of finding many of the quantities suitable are absurdly very low—which, paradoxically, is why lotto revolutionized the marketplace.

Prior to the sport was released, condition jackpots had been fairly modest. Their size was confined by the quantity of gamers, considering the fact that payouts reflected a share of ticket income, in addition to by point out lottery commissions, which established a cap about the prize revenue; from 1964 to 1979, jackpots seldom exceeded a million dollars. But lotto was a rollover match: if a drawing was held and no-one received—a standard prevalence, specified the odds—gamers could continue to keep buying tickets. For all those profiting from your lottery, this developed a virtuous cycle. Each time the pot got bigger, more and more people have been tempted to purchase a ticket, and also the more and more people bought tickets, The larger the pot became.

The complete issue was hugely counterintuitive—the worse the percentages of successful grew to become, the more and more people wished to Participate in. Alexander Hamilton was appropriate: to the average particular person, the distinction between 1-in-3-million odds and a person-in-three-hundred-million odds didn’t issue, but the difference between A 3-million-greenback jackpot and a three-hundred-million-dollar jackpot mattered enormously. Recognizing this, lottery commissioners began lifting prize caps and including much more quantities—say, 6 out of fifty rather than 5 away from thirty—Therefore earning the chance of profitable even scaled-down. The The big apple Lotto launched, in 1978, with a person-in-three.eight-million odds; currently, the chances are 1 in forty-5 million.

Even with All of this, and to the despair of statisticians just about everywhere, lotto quickly grew to become the nation’s most widely used lottery activity. But although ticket sales and prize winnings soared, they did not accomplish that Similarly across the nation, given that rollover jackpots disproportionately benefitted states with large populations and as a consequence a lot more possible gamers. In response, smaller sized states banded with each other to sort multistate lotteries, a craze that culminated in Powerball and Mega Millions, Every single of which commenced to be a collaboration among the A few states but is now played all over the place the lottery is lawful. The ensuing prizes are genuinely astronomical; this past July, two individuals that acquired a lottery ticket in Illinois bucked one particular-in-three-hundred-and-two-million odds to win a $one.34-billion Mega Thousands and thousands jackpot.

In some respects, the trendy American lotto game is an item of technological alter; it couldn't have existed prior to Laptop or computer systems that enabled states to find out kind of quickly no matter whether anyone had procured a ticket Along with the profitable numbers. But Cohen can make a persuasive circumstance that it was also a product of cultural modify: the top of a shared reverence for Center-class balance as well as increase, from the nineteen-eighties, with the veneration of extravagant prosperity. The 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 “Lifestyles on the Rich and Popular” and a remake of “Brewster’s Thousands and thousands.” Pastors were being preaching the prosperity gospel; politicians had been singing the praises of your unfettered free of charge sector. All of a sudden, Cohen writes, “it absolutely was now not taboo to gather a huge fortune; neither was it offensive to show it off. Prosperity—not the prosperity of blue-collar staff although the fortunes in their bosses—turned a means of reasserting the bounty of capitalism.”

The irony, as Cohen notes, is this obsession with unimaginable wealth, including the dream of hitting a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot, corresponded to a decrease in economic stability for most working people today. Starting inside the nineteen-seventies and accelerating inside the nineteen-eighties, the cash flow hole involving the rich along with the inadequate widened, position protection and pensions eroded, overall health-treatment fees and unemployment rose, and, for youngsters born in These decades, our lengthy-standing national promise—that education and labor would render them superior off than their parents—ceased being correct. Life, as it turned out, imitated the lottery: for some Americans, it was acquiring harder and more challenging to acquire.

The lottery was imagined to make all this superior, not even worse. Its advocates claimed that, by filling condition coffers without the need of increasing point out taxes, it will maintain income in the pockets of typical citizens. But this premise, which led state right after condition to approve lotteries, was basically untrue. Evidence from the 1st legalized lotteries promptly set paid to your fantasy that they would provide sufficient income to fund A lot in the organization of managing a state. In New Jersey, where by proponents experienced imagined proceeds within the get of many countless pounds, the lottery brought in 30-a few million dollars in its initially yr—about two for every cent of the condition’s profits.

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When figures like that proved usual from the era, legalization advocates, no longer in a position to promote the lottery as being a statewide silver bullet, ginned up other tactics in its place, often with the help of Scientific Games. Rather then argue that a lottery would float almost all of a point out’s spending budget, they began proclaiming that it will protect an individual line item, invariably a governing administration support which was well-liked and nonpartisan—most frequently training, but sometimes elder care or community parks or aid for veterans. One particular advantage of the narrower strategy was that it built campaigning for legalization straightforward. A vote for that lottery wasn't a way of supporting gambling but a method of supporting veterans; a vote in opposition to the lottery was a vote towards schooling.

These campaignsหวย ลาว ออก วัน นี้ สด were being extraordinarily powerful but, as with the earlier types, essentially misleading. For one thing, they, also, wildly inflated the impact of lottery dollars on point out finances. In California, where by an S.G.I.-backed lottery initiative handed following a superior-profile marketing campaign touted it to be a boon for schoolchildren, the ensuing income coated, in the lottery’s first 12 months, about five for every cent in the point out schooling finances. As of this 12 months, in accordance with the California Division of Instruction, lottery income accounts for about one particular for each cent of all K-12 funding.

But which was not the worst of it. Over and over, instruction together with other line products that served to influence individuals to move lottery proposals did not really get any supplemental funding; as an alternative, the revenue went into the state’s common fund. Immediately after this happened in California, other states mandated that lottery funds movement right into specified systems, but, as is so typically the case, when just one loophole closes, An additional just one opens. In Illinois, Florida, and Virginia, between other states, the lottery revenue did without a doubt go to a designated instruction fund—whereupon legislators offset People gains by minimizing the money coming in from basic appropriations. In the end, Cohen writes, “the lottery supplanted, as an alternative to supplemented, state paying out on schooling.”

Today, according to the Nationwide Convention of Point out Legislatures, lotteries usher in, on typical, about one particular for each cent of state revenue per year. Like all revenue, it issues, but whichever variance it would make is offset by two troubles. The first is that lotteries have designed it tougher than previously to pass A great deal required tax improves, since, thanks to yrs of noisy campaigning followed by decades of weighty advertising, the general public wrongly believes that educational institutions and other very important solutions are lavishly supported by gambling cash. The 2nd would be that the money raised by lotteries will come largely with the individuals who can least pay for to element with it. Just about every state lottery is regressive, meaning that it's going to take a disproportionate toll on small-profits citizens. Prosperous folks do Participate in the lottery, certainly; amongst the largest-at any time Powerball jackpots, a quarter of a billion pounds, was gained by three asset administrators from Greenwich, Connecticut. But the rich acquire less tickets compared to poor (except when jackpots strategy ten figures); because of that and since their buys represent a Substantially scaled-down percentage in their money, participating in the lottery provides a far lesser influence on their pocketbooks. The real difference may be drastic: based on the customer economical organization Bankrate, gamers making in excess of fifty thousand pounds each year commit, on ordinary, 1 for each cent in their yearly income on lottery tickets; those producing a lot less than 30 thousand pounds commit thirteen for every cent. Which means a person creating 20-seven thousand pounds loses some thirty-5 hundred dollars to the lottery on a yearly basis. To put that selection in context, practically sixty for every cent of Americans have a lot less than a thousand dollars in discounts.

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Defenders in the lottery in some cases cast it like a tax to the Silly, this means possibly that gamers don’t understand how unlikely They can be to win or they take pleasure in the activity in any case. This means that lottery shelling out is an entirely personalized as an alternative to a partly structural final decision, but Actually it really is responsive to financial fluctuation; as Cohen writes, “Lottery revenue maximize as incomes drop, unemployment grows, and poverty rates rise.” Just like all industrial products and solutions, lottery product sales also maximize with exposure to promoting—and lottery products are most seriously promoted in neighborhoods which have been disproportionately poor, Black, or Latino. In Texas, the place the least wage is $seven.twenty five, You should buy a fifty-greenback scratch-off ticket at a Check out-cashing venue or pick up Powerball and Mega Millions tickets, like Snickers bars, whilst paying for groceries in a Dollar Basic. Nor are state lottery commissions above availing them selves of the psychology of dependancy. Every little thing concerning the lottery—from ad strategies for the look with the front on the tickets and the math guiding them—is made to continue to keep players returning For additional. None of this is especially unique from the procedures of tobacco corporations or video clip-match producers. It just isn’t normally performed beneath the auspices of the government.

In the ultimate pages of “For the Greenback plus a Dream,” Cohen, a fair and meticulous collector of data, eventually puts his thumb on the dimensions. Thinking of the regressive mother nature of state lotteries, their predatory procedures, their position in fostering gambling addictions, the way they discourage usual taxation, and their comparatively modest economic contributions, he concludes that they “must not exist in the fashionable Usa.” As he acknowledges, this recommendation is not likely for being taken anytime before long; no condition has repealed its lottery in more than a hundred and 20-5 years. Nevertheless, he argues, we must always do the job towards prevalent-sense reforms, including banning the sale of tickets online, capping the expense of scratch-off tickets and the size of lotto jackpots, and, Possibly most crucial, closing a loophole that leaves lotteries exempt from File.T.C. regulation, and therefore absolutely free from the constraints of reality-in-promoting rules.

What would come about if state lotteries waned in impact or vanished altogether? Cohen definitely overreaches when he claims that, “without having such a blinding beacon, much more Us residents may be prepared to think critically concerning the financial forces that have degraded usage of social mobility and have built it more difficult for people today to attain monetary stability.” But he is right that governments in a democratic society must be within the company of enhancing the odds, not rigging the game, and that there are way more equitable and helpful techniques for your point out to make use of its mighty powers to improve life for its citizens. As the California Lottery place it within a 2013 advertising and marketing campaign, “Have confidence in one thing larger.” ♦