Success Quote by Adam Smith

Smith is taking a scalpel to a very human habit: mistaking activity for advantage. The line targets the lottery buyer who thinks more tickets means “playing smart,” when the real math of gambling works in reverse. “Adventure” is the tell. It’s a sly, faintly moralized verb - to venture, to hazard - that frames speculation as a choice, not a fate. You can almost hear the dry Enlightenment eyebrow raise: if you insist on courting randomness, you don’t merely risk loss; you manufacture it.

The apparent paradox - more tickets, closer to certainty of losing - is doing rhetorical work. Smith isn’t claiming each additional ticket lowers expected winnings in some crude way. He’s pointing at expectation versus outcome. Your expected return might be calculable, but your lived experience is loss, repeated and reinforced. Buy enough chances in a negative-sum game and you all but guarantee you’ll encounter loss, often enough to feel like a law of nature. Quantity creates the illusion of control while deepening exposure to a rigged payoff structure.

Context matters: The Wealth of Nations is as much a psychology of markets as a treatise on them. Smith is arguing against the glamour of “projects,” speculative schemes, and the credulity that bubbles feed on. The subtext is about rational capitalism’s enemy inside the house: the investor who confuses probability with promise. It’s a warning that feels modern because it is - swaps and meme stocks are just better-dressed tickets.