Given the current sour economic forecasts and inflation concerns, I don't think the lottery spend increasing is surprising.
Dance Marathons (also called Walkathons), an American phenomenon of the 1920s and 1930s, were human endurance contests in which couples danced almost non-stop for hundreds of hours (as long as a month or two), competing for prize money."
it doesn't matter when rich people play the lottery, whereas it does matter when poor people play the lottery as its a meaningful proportion of their available earnings
They do. It's called "incorporating a company" or "investing in the stock market" often with leverage.
I would guess that for a regular non-connected, non-ivy league folk the chance of becoming a billionaire is roughly the same creating a startup vs. the lottery.
At that point it makes sense to play the lottery if you are a "swing for the fences" kind of guy, that's because when odds are kinda the same it makes way more sense to throw 500$ monthly in lottery tickets than throwing 14h/6d/52w yearly in precious time to build a company or reading balance sheets of publicly traded companies
We were discussing the lottery.
I estimate that about 5% of people aged 20-30 currently have this ability.
I agree. One hopes they have a civilisation to come home to.