Meanwhile, the people who sell you the lottery ticket act completely rationally. Funny---it's still lottery tickets, but when the odds are in your favour the hope is no longer needed.
I wish I remembered where I heard this concept, as it helped make the tendency to purchase lottery tickets by low-income individuals more understandable:
Buying lottery tickets is buying 'hope insurance'
From my own perspective, there are a few different ways in which I could become fabulously wealthy, or at least much more financially secure than I am now. I could create or work for a hugely successful company. I could make a killing in real estate. I could win second place in a beauty contest. Lots of different things.
I try my best not to be materialistic, but there are times when I see beautiful homes or fancy cars or $650 Prada shoes and I think "I could so totally enjoy that someday". There's at least a little bit of hope that I could, someday.
There are lots of people out there who, without the ability to buy lottery tickets, would feel they have no possible way to become fabulously wealthy (even if that feeling isn't strictly correct). For these people, there's no sense of hope for breaking out of where they are, and the absence of hope is very painful. Spending a few dollars a week on lottery tickets to keep that hope alive becomes a sort of rational purchase. People aren't actuarial robots.
I'm not saying that I think that buying lottery tickets are a good idea, or that government-run lotteries aren't a form of abusive regressive taxation, but the conclusion of the linked article that people are still poor because they keep on buying lottery tickets is naive and condescending.
Looking back, there seems to be a correlation between the times in my life when I've bought lottery tickets, and the times in my life when I've felt hopeless.
If I ever feel trapped by circumstances, depressed, lost, or I don't have optimism for the future, the less logical part of my brain will somehow rationalise the remote chance of winning millions as a perfectly justified excuse for buying a ticket. The author of this piece is right about how lottery tickets buy you a sense of hope, and prompt you to envision your life being better.
So these days I see it as a sign that something in my life needs to change when I take an active interest in this week's Powerball prizes. It's become a kind of signalling mechanism for my subconscious.
Was going to say this. People pay for a lottery ticket to dream about what their life could be like if they won (similar to people who never launch that buiness idea). Many people derive a lot of happiness from this, moreover (in the uk) a large proportion of the takings goes to good causes and people generally accept it is extremely unlikely they will win but instead of just donating to charity they at least have a slim chance of a massive gain.
This doesn't take into account the value of the "hope" that buying a lottery ticket gets you. Specifically, the owner of a lottery ticket has bought the right to dream about how their life could suddenly be turned around if only their numbers came up.
I admit that this "hope" may not be worth much to some people, but to those who are scraping by it might be worth quite a lot. (I will leave discussion about whether lotteries exploit the poor to another day.)
Even though you do actually buy a sense of hope, it makes you worry more about missing an opportunity to win ("if only I had bought a few more tickets"). So it goes both ways and personally I feel happier by ignoring these (statistically - mostly false) hopes.
(OTOH I still need to worry about key employees winning the lottery, but that's another sad/cynical story.)
People pay for a lottery ticket to dream about what their life could be like if they won (similar to people who never launch that buiness idea). Many people derive a lot of happiness from this, moreover (in the uk) a large proportion of the takings goes to good causes and people generally accept it is extremely unlikely they will win but instead of just donating to charity they at least have a slim chance of a massive gain.
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