as days pass by

Why I Play The Lottery

There is a persistent meme that lotteries are a tax on people who can’t do maths and are stupid. I don’t think I’m stupid¹ and I’m OK² at maths, and I play the lottery. This is why.

Basically, my desire for money is not linear, because I’m not homo economicus.³ My laws of desire for money are more Einsteinian than Newtonian: linear desire for money works at small amounts, but as they get higher it gets weird. I might desire £4 twice as much as £2, true enough; small amounts, Newton’s sensible laws. But I don’t desire £2 million twice as much as £1 million, because having a million would be enough and what would I do with the second million? I desire a million quite a lot more than a hundred times as much as £10,000, because a million quid is amazing and ten grand is a new car. The lottery gives me, for a negligible outlay, an outside chance of having a million quid, which would be radically life-changing (because I’d never have to work again).

There’s no other way I’ll get a million pounds. Sure, my chances of winning the lottery are at pretty adverse odds (roughly, 1 in 14 million chance of winning; when I win I get somewhere in between 2 and 6 million pounds). But having a million quid is a goal I’d like to hit. I can attempt that with almost no work.

Imagine that I wanted a million, and I started with a pound. Perhaps I should play roulette instead, which has a much more favourable edge than the lottery (although it’s still unfavourable; 5 ⁵/₁₉% for the bank and against me). So I stick my quid on black 17, and it comes up; a chance of 1/38, and I get £36 back for a total of £37. I let that £37 ride, and black 17 comes up again, so I now have £1369. Ride again⁴ for £50653, and again for £1.8 million, which is retirement money and so I stop. The chances of that happening; 1 in 2 million or so. So playing roulette is very roughly equivalent to playing the lottery (chances of getting a million quid: one in some millions). And the lottery is a lot easier to do; you don’t have to put on a dinner jacket and walk to the casino, and you can play for a pound.⁵

This is the point. I won’t miss the money, it’s very easy to do, and it might end up changing my life, so why not do it? If I were actually good at maths, maybe I’d plot a graph of some sort of quotient made up of “amount spent” vs “effort required” vs “amount won”. I bet the lottery looks quite a lot better than “working for a living”, on that graph.

I should note here that the second part of the meme which is often quoted alongside it is that lotteries are a tax on the poor; that is, people who will miss that hundred pounds a year. This is completely correct. I would not notice the half-a-pint a week that the lottery costs me; this is not the case for others, and lotteries being a tax on the poor is entirely correct.

not all the time, anyway ↩
ish ↩
People aren’t identical and spherical, either ↩
ignore table limits here ↩
there are casinos which will let you put a quid on a roulette wheel spin, but good luck finding a table which allows wagering a quid and allows wagering fifty grand ↩

I'm currently available for hire, to help you plan, architect, and build new systems, and for technical writing and articles. You can take a look at some projects I've worked on and some of my writing. If you'd like to talk about your upcoming project, do get in touch.

scratched tallies on the prison wall

Why I Play The Lottery

More in the discussion (powered by webmentions)