For one dollar a lottery player purchases entertainment and maybe even a bit of optimism for a little bit of time.<p>I have always found the "math tax" line silly. I've never understood why "math tax" people assume that the only utility that a lottery ticket provides is the expected value of the payout. Is a ten dollar ticket to a spy movie a waste of money since there is little likelihood that watching it is going to get me a job with some OGA?
The urge to play the lottery is a very normal cognitive bias. I know it has a negative expected return, but I do feel drawn to play it when the prize gets very large. The actual reason I didn't participate is that my aversion to waiting in line is even stronger than my urge to buy a ticket.<p>Dan Kahneman's book "Thinking Fast and Slow" is good reading for anyone who thinks that only stupid people feel the urge to play the lottery. It's more subtle than that, and worth understanding because these biases affect all of us in many important decisions.<p>Note that the lottery has about the same expected return as insurance (around 50% I think), and I've always bought insurance for risks I don't want to cover personally. Is overpaying to cover downside risks "smart" but overpaying for big upsides "stupid"? I don't have an opinion either way. If I consider the question, I can't tell if my own opinion would be more informed by my knowledge of psychology and statistics, or by my attitudes about prudence and waste.
I think very analytically the majority of the time, even when I'm not programming. When I saw this lottery in the headlines and in friends' Facebook posts, the first thing I did was break out a calculator and figure all the relevant statistics of interest to me, not because I thought it might be worth it, but just to see exactly, numerically, <i>how</i> ridiculous the mass-attention to this lottery was. I suspect a lot of the HN community think like this.<p>Most people absolutely do not think this way. The thinking of the average person is more social, more concerned with ritual, more qualitative, and less quantitative. Their friends are talking about it, the number is big, people are going in on ticket pools together, they fantasize, and some of the affect of that fantasizing transfers to their goal-seeking behavior. Not fully appreciating that they <i>can</i> refer to solid math on this, they adapt their attitude and expectations to the cues of those around them.
Something's got to be a bit out of whack when governments sanction and even sponsor lotteries where the odds of even getting your investment back are worse than 1:4, and governments make it illegal for masses of people to invest equivalent amounts in startup companies, all in order to protect the people from the possible downside of losing their investment.<p>Reminds me of a bumper sticker:
"Don't steal. The government hates competition."
"I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged." -Roger Jones<p>I haven't followed much of his other work, but this rings true.
A lot of people scoff at the lottery because of the odds, yet few would go without earthquake or fire insurance and many have money in the stock market.<p>Here's a hint: there's more to the mathematics than odds.<p>It's about expected return, barrier to entry, and the consequences of not doing something. Odds are only a small part of the equation.
We bought $40 of tickets. We did it because we lacked the vision to buy AAPL when it had a $5B market cap.<p>It is really a form of entertainment and escapism. Someone could do an interesting photo series of people at booths (when there is a big jackpot, not the regular regulars).<p>Day dreaming and lottery entering, both useless/damaging in excess - maybe ok in moderation.
As an outsider (a Canadian) I thought the most compelling thing about this jackpot (MegaMillions $656 Million) was that it escalated from the announced $540 Million BETWEEN draws. Surely there is not a better indicator the of state of the American economy than this.
As the value of a winning ticket goes up, the expected value of any given ticket approaches the price of a single ticket. Of course this isn't really true, but even a small miscalculation, multiplied by half a billion, could easily make it look like a good deal.