The “Poverty Solved!” graphic about the Powerball $1.3 billion jackpot is wrong [Updated]

There’s a graphic about the record-breaking Powerball jackpot that’s going around the internet. Given how bad at many people are at math, I can’t tell whether it was originally intended as a joke or not. It reads:

Powerball 1.3 Billion
÷ U.S. Pop 300 Million
Everyone receives 4.33 mil
Poverty solved!

It sounds nice and inspiring, but it isn’t true. Some people will say it’s because redistribution of wealth doesn’t work and will only make things worse, and we can argue that point another time. I’m arguing that it isn’t true because the math is wrong. Here’s why:

• The Powerball jackpot is 1.3 billion dollars. A billion is 1,000 times a million, and 1.3 billion is 1,300 times a million.
• The U.S. population is slightly over 300 million, which is another way of saying 300 times a million.
• Dividing 1,300 million (the Powerball prize money) among 300 million people (the U.S. population) is exactly the same as dividing 1,300 by 300, which is the same as dividing 13 by 3: $4.33.

It won’t fix poverty, but it will buy every American a Grande-sized Starbucks drink or the Sausage McMuffin with Egg meal at McDonald’s. It’s not the American Dream; it’s more of an American snack.

Update: The “British billion” explanation

A number of people have read my article and suggested that perhaps the poster used the wrong form of “billion”, because there are two:

• The modern form, where a billion is 1,000,000,000 — written as 1 followed by 9 zeroes, and also expressed as 10⁹ or “ten to the ninth power”.
• The archaic British form, where a billion is a million million, or 1,000,000,000,000 — written as 1 followed by 12 zeroes, and also expressed as 10¹² or “ten to the twelfth power”. It’s why some people in the UK still use the form “thousand million” to refer to what we in North America call a billion.

Even if the Powerball jackpot was 1.3 British billion dollars, simple order-of-magnitude estimation shows that you won’t give everyone in the US a million bucks. Divvying that amount (on the order of 10¹²) among the US population (300 million, which is on the order of 10⁸) can at most yield an amount of 10⁴, or $10,000. If you run the actual numbers, it gives each American $4,333. That won’t lift America out of poverty, but it could give each and every American a new laptop, tablet, and smartphone.