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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

The lottery is an accepted tax on math morons, as my old teacher liked to say.

And people have "learned" that and somehow think that when the expected return goes "positive" that it somehow isn't silly anymore.

I would be interested to see it change so the jackpot doesn't go UP each time, but instead the number of winners goes UP somehow - perhaps by drawing an extra powerball if nobody has won for a certain period.

The absolute sad part of it is the large percentage of people who play and shouldn't; you rarely see the well-off playing, but you will see poorer people playing (which makes some sense, Bill Gates winning wouldn't change him at all).

Even sadder is what happens to the winners on average; the winner is often someone not good with money and they get given a large amount of the thing they're not good with.

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> The lottery is an accepted tax on math morons, as my old teacher liked to say.

There is a difference between zero and a non-zero chance of winning, even if you hold just one ticket. Even if the probability is low, it's non-zero nevertheless. Someone always wins.

> I would be interested to see it change so the jackpot doesn't go UP each time, but instead the number of winners goes UP somehow - perhaps by drawing an extra powerball if nobody has won for a certain period.

This is more or less the concept of the lottery game with the MIT group stories.

Once the accumulated prize pot hit a certain number, the pot would 'roll down' to all winners on that drawing. So, the meta game was to buy as many tickets as possible for a rolldown drawing. And then, to buy as many tickets as possible for a near rolldown drawing to force it into rolldown, perhaps without other buying groups noticing. Of course, this meta game turns this type of drawing into less of an 'everyone can win' thing and more of a those with resources can work the odds and come out ahead; which is contrary to the preferred public image of the lotteries.

On the traditional lotteries, you do see that the large jackpots tend to have more cases of multiple jackpot tickets.

> The lottery is an accepted tax on math morons, as my old teacher liked to say.

This glib old chestnut falls apart when you ask the "math savvy" what the probability of winning is when a person buys more than 1 ticket. Probabilities are unintuitive here (albeit simple) such that most people are "morons".

Even then the whole thing breaks down because the chance of winning is so astronomically small

Even sadder is what happens to the winners on average; the winner is often someone not good with money and they get given a large amount of the thing they're not good with.

You don't need to be particularly good with money if you have more than you can ever spend.

Most big lotto wins are in the seven to low eight digit range. You can absolutely blow away that amount of money in just a few years, and there are dozens of examples.

Off the top of my head, Evelyn Adams. Won the lottery twice, thirty years later she had blown through it all and was living in a trailer park.

Funny, I took this comment in pretty much the opposite way. As in people on high incomes are probably kidding themselves about what good money managers they are - the stakes are pretty low when you get another 5 or six figures dunked into your account regularly.

Single parents raising a few kids on minimum wage? That requires some real financial planning

That may not be that "hard" if you simply don't spend money you don't have. But now everyone has easy access to credit so it's harder to keep your income below your expenses without careful calculation and work.

I do believe I just got told that having a high income and access to easy credit makes it harder to manage your money than living on the poverty line.

God, I love this site.

It's been demonstrated to be quite possible to outspend lotto winnings.

To start with, the headline numbers are usually the sum of the annuity payment option, cash value is 50%, federal tax rate is close to 50%, so you only really get 25% of the headline.

Then people spend a bunch of money on extravagent gifts for family and friends and themselves; then it's time to take bad loans and make bad investments. A couple million here, a couple million there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Well managed, a much smaller sum would be enough for a nice life with no money stress, but it's demonstrated possible to overspend it to bankruptcy.

It's not that hard to spend $200M. Charted private jets are expensive. Rolls Royces are expensive. Multiple $10M homes are expensive.

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