With a $900 million jackpot for Powerball — that’s a U.S. lottery game playable in 44 states as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands — I found myself waiting in line to pay for my drink behind an assortment of ticket buyers at my local shoddily-constructed convenience store. Tickets are $2 each, and I saw the people ahead of me dropping $10, $20, $50, and in one case, a whopping $68. You may scoff at these sums, but these people couldn’t: they weren’t spending “walking around” money, but what was probably grocery money.
A couple ahead of me were arguing about whether or not blowing $40 on Powerball tickets was a good idea. “You got a chance of like, what? One in a million? Or two million?” she said, but he wouldn’t be swayed.
“Yeah, it’s one in a million,” he retorted, “but what if I’m that one?“
Mathematically, “but what if I’m that one?” is a nonsensical response, but it appeals to that part of our brains that also gloms onto other nonsense like “things happen for a reason,” “juice cleanses remove the toxins from your body”, “vaccines cause autism”, and “hey, let’s go to Olive Garden!” For a lot of people, those ideas just make a sort of intuitive sense.
If you know someone who’s about to blow money that they can’t afford to lose on Powerball, point them to the Los Angeles Times’ Powerball simulator. It lets you enter your six lucky numbers (or let the computer create a random “quick pick”), pick an amount of money you want to spend on tickets, and simulates a lottery while tracking what you spent, and how far ahead or behind you are. In the screenshot below, you can see that my idea of spending a simulated $200,000 on Powerball rather than pretending to invest it in index funds isn’t working out very well:
Give it a try and truly experience what slim odds are like. The odds of winning $1 million are slightly better than one in 12 million, while the odds of winning that $800 million jackpot are one in almost 300 million.
