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One of the questions I get about the series is, what do you mean when you say America's most

successful lottery? Like, are you sure success is the right word here?

The answer, I think, is yes. And here is what I mean by it. Every part of government has a purpose.

Maybe it's to build roads, educate children, protect the environment. The purpose of the lottery is to raise money by selling lottery tickets.

And by that measure, however you feel about the purpose, the mass lottery is a great success.

We should be proud of it.

I wish every part of my government were so successful at its own purpose.

Now, if you've been with us since our first season about the mighty infrastructure project known as the Big Dig. You know that it did not go

so smoothly. Obviously, that was a very different kind of government endeavor. It involved tunneling

through downtown Boston and under the harbor. But if you step back and stick with me here,

the lottery and the Big Dig have a lot in common.

They required coordination, design, technical expertise, political support, people power, all the ingredients of state action.

So why do the two stories play out so, so differently?

From GBAH News, this is Scratch and Win.

I'm Ian Koss.

Today I'm talking with Mark Dunkelman about his new book,

Why Nothing Works. Mark is a fellow at Brown University, and he and I started corresponding after the Big Dig series came out when we realized we were exploring a similar question of why it was so

hard for the government to do big things. As I was finishing up my book, I was listening to your

podcast and thinking to myself, man, we really have stumbled on a similar body of thinking at the same

...