You remember Doctor Evil, the villain who pursued Austin Powers across the 20th century. Both had been frozen in the 1960s and reemerged in the 1990s, complete with their old-fashioned catchphrases and bad teeth. Doctor Evil was intent on global destruction.

He could blow the whole planet to smithereens. Everyone was afraid of him. I think he had a naked cat. Altogether he was the very model of an evil genius. And then he named his terms for not destroying the planet.

"One meellion dollars." And suddenly we knew that Doctor Evil, for all his great powers, was not familiar with inflation.

Now we live in a country where one million euro will not fulfil our dreams anymore. One million euro is not enough to retire on.

It's not enough to enable an Irish person to tell their boss to shove the damn job.

It's not even enough to buy a couple of houses for various deserving members of your family. The current minimum jackpot in the National Lottery of 1.3m is now regarded as inadequate to our needs. It's hardly worth having a family row over. The press photographers couldn't be bothered turning up at your door if you won it. People would not offer you sexual favours because of it. The whole vocabulary of fabulous wealth has changed.

It is the new director of the National Lottery, Dermot Griffin, who has said so. "A million euro doesn't cut it anymore, " he said last week. He seems a straight-talking sort of person. It's the house prices what done it, apparently.

Sales of lottery tickets have been in decline for some years.

Presumably one million euro would still make a great deal of difference to the unfashionable people who have continued to buy lottery tickets every week. If they won, they might visit their son in Australia, buy all their grandchildren presents and still be able to afford to get the central heating put in, and perhaps go private and buy that plastic hip. But the loyal customers don't cut much mustard in the land of fabulous wealth: it's the new customers everybody's after.

To that end, the minimum jackpot in the National Lottery will now be 2m. Ticket prices have risen accordingly. This is a fascinating moment.

The lottery has come face to face with the consumer society. Instead of riches being dispensed from on high, in a windfall of fortune, in an unimaginable orgy of largesse, the lottery now has to fight for our attention. Some very important person once said that a lottery was a tax on stupidity. Suddenly . . . or not so suddenly, if only we had been paying attention . . . the lottery itself didn't look too clever. Nineteen years after its foundation, the National Lottery has admitted that the customers in recent years were staying away in their millions, because the reward of 1.3m was simply not big enough anymore.

Like Doctor Evil, the Lottery had become a rather embarrassing fossil from another era. An era when getting rich was a matter of chance, of luck, when a stream of money was a very slim prospect indeed. Cash was a rarity across all social classes. Now cash . . . or, at least, credit . . . rushes round us at waist level. And there was the National Lottery standing on the shore with a very small watering can which held just 1.3m, expecting our gratitude.

So I suppose we should be glad that Dermot Griffin has led the Lottery in to the modern era, and brought it in to line with our vertiginous expectations. The only tiny cloud on the horizon is that, if things continue this way, Doctor Evil could end up looking stupid saying "two meellion dollars".

We'll have to adjust.