In ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a world in which nobody has a fixed position in society.

In the story, while the Lottery started out like any typical lottery, it evolved into one which not only gives prizes to the winners, but also inflicts consequences on the losers. Further evolution increased its complexity; the Lottery Company has total power and everyone participates. If fortune smiles on the player, he or she can win promotion into the councils of authority. On the other hand, if the player makes a bad choice, different kinds of infamy follow. The Lottery Company dictates all aspects of everyone's life. There are various conjectures on how it started:

For most readers of ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, such an uncertain social life seems atrocious. While there is a structure and an order in that society, they are quite unbearable for the majority of people in the world. Still, in the 1990s life in Argentina was a microcosm of that in Borges’ Babylon. Reforms inspired by the neoliberal policies of the government established the ‘capitalist market’ as the basis of reality. The state retreated, giving comprehensive powers to ‘the Market’, in the belief that it would create a powerful and efficient economy. The government had enough support at that point to impose the reforms. The goal was to unleash ‘market forces’, but no one questioned how the market started, who was behind it, and what its limits should be, even though it affected everyone's lives.