This is a widely shared dream: winning a lottery - and winning it when as young as possible.

A US couple, Norman and Deanna Shue, won half of a US$221.5 million multi-state lottery jackpot. The couple can take their US$110.75 million over 30 years or an immediate lump sum of US$60.1 million, before taxes.

There is some comfort in the fact that taxes are so high in the US. This may be one of the few merits of high taxation - quenching jealousy.

And it feels better whenever I am reminded that it is a far-away US couple who have won rather than one of my neighbours or my colleagues. And much less that it was not one of my subordinates, who, if they had had that luck, would have kept nagging me about whether to continue the enjoyable experience of working for me or not.

What is more comfortable is that we are really fortunate to be living in China where there is no such fat lottery, the biggest being for 5 million yuan (US$604,600). Otherwise it would be very hard for me, and for many others, to bear hearing such good news, however infrequently it came.

It is always a pleasant time when my family or my friends dream about what we would plan to do if one of us won the 5 million yuan lottery. Answers vary from putting it into the bank and living on the interest for the rest of one's life to spending it on 10 houses and selling them five years later after hiring a bodyguard first. There are the empty promises like: "Oh, I'll give half of it to you, my dear."

I believe every one of us has had that kind of daydream. The difference is that the clever dream about winning only once while the less clever dream more often. The number of times one dreams of winning increases proportionately with one's stupidity.

It is always another happy moment when my family works hard on mathematics - probability - to try to "read between the numbers" to see if there may be any hidden laws of chance or at least, any coincidences. In reality, that is really stupid, but as often is the rule, people living in hope often do not know that they are doing something stupid.

Lotteries have a much shorter history than other kinds of gambling but there seems to be no material difference between the two. That luck in life is a gamble is unchallengeable. But if viewed from another perspective, why must life be fair, or at least, fair in the sense of not being a gamble?

Often when the media report who has won the 5 million yuan lottery in Shanghai, they will consciously or unconsciously highlight the fact that the winner is a migrant worker from East China's Anhui Province (a less developed province). Such a portrayal, expected to be more sensational and eye-catching, is based on the correct assumption that, for the public, hearing that a migrant worker has won proves more painful than hearing that the winner is already a millionaire, whose winning the lottery generates no more jealousy. Or a member of the social elite, whose winning the lottery appears, at least morally, more justifiable than the migrant worker, who might have only received a primary school education.

But that is the problem. On the surface, lotteries seem unfair but why is a society based on meritocracy fair (it is productive, though)? Is it fair that the migrant worker was born in Anhui and received little education and that the door to high society is closed forever to him? Considering all this, maybe it is not so unfair that he becomes an "upstart" overnight.

If you are still uncomfortable with this, try to think that at least you are an aristocrat, which takes three generations to achieve, while he is only an "upstart", which takes only one night to achieve - plus a lottery ticket.

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