I was thinking about lottery odds, and how so much of the pitch is, essentially, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take, with the thought that you should at least enter because your odds go up so much with just one ticket. The odds were non existent before, and now they exist even if they’re vanishingly small.
Is the difference between 1 in a million and 0 in a million actually somehow more than the difference between 1 in a million and 2 in a million, or between 492,368 in a million vs 492,369 in a million? Or are all three of these functionally the same?
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Lotteries are a tax on people who don’t understand math.
Assuming you must pick 6 correct numbers ranging from 1 – 49, your odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 13,983,816, per my local lottery website.
Sure, “somebody” has to win it, but you would be far better off just putting that money in an investment account that paid interest equivalent 5%.
In short, the difference between buying 1 ticket, or zero tickets, is that you will still have the ticket price in your wallet, a virtually infinite improvement in value vs. the ticket.
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