Psychologically, I’m not sure that it’s a ‘blue-collar’ versus ‘white-collar’ thing so much as a ‘less powerful’ versus ‘more powerful’ thing.
Let me explain. I used to buy lottery tickets fairly often. I was also in debt, barely =keeping my head above water, and stressed to the max. I felt powerless and trapped, and lottery tickets were an inexpensive hope of escape. I mean that literally: an inexpensive hope with just enough reality to stick. After all, one might win.
Later, I crashed and burned financially. I went through a six year process of debt repayment. I started to save money. I began to find my personal power again: I could buy things and not have to worry at all about payments. Vast continents of worry no longer plague me, and I can actually make plans again.
I have also lost interest in gambling. I haven’t bought lottery tickets in years. My sister and I went into the casino in the Soo and wandered around for ten minutes or so, looked at each other, said, “This is fun?”, and left.
I therefore submit that gambling appeals most to people who feel that they don’t have other possibilities of making their lives better. The more possibilities you feel you have, the less you’re likely to gamble.
Of course, this ignores questions of addiction to stimulation and so on.
I don’t understand. My point is that dreaming doesn’t have to cost any money. Daydream that someone gives you a pile of money, or that you find your winning lottery ticket on the street. The odds are close enough so as not to matter.
The probability of winning if you don’t buy a ticket is only 0.00001% or so lower than if you do buy one.
I can’t say it any better than that. It’s not how I would choose to spend my money, but I don’t like people scrutinizing how I spend my disposable income so I try not to do it to others.
Right. So I spend $2 to get an hours worth of daydreams of “what would I do if I won the Lotto?”. A Movie is $10 for 2 hours of fantasy. Lotto tickets are thus cheap. I 'm with** NurseCarmen**.
Once every 5-6 months I get a wild hair and stop in for a ticket. I don’t participate in the office group whose members drop $10-20 a month each into a common pool. But for the 3-4 bucks I spend a year, I enjoy the dreams of avarice. And last time I played, I won $4 bucks back! Which I, uhh…immediately spent on 4 new tickets, which won me…umm…nothing. But I was playing with house money, so my rich daydreams lasted a week this time instead of 3 days.
Oh well. Someone wins these things eventually, and one day it just might be me. But, I’m not holding my breath.
The moral of the story: Wait until the 8th. Right?
Gambling is dumb if you are sure you’re going to win, or if you expect to walk away with more money than you started with. We tend to visualize some idiot going into a casino with a huge grin on his face and walking out shocked and disappointed, but I don’t think most people really are like that.
For me, it’s like football in that most people like it, but I cannot grasp the appeal. Some people are entertained in the most bizare ways, which is fine. Slot machines, to me, are like arcade games MINUS the fun part, you put in your quarter, grab the stick and…the end.
I love those conversations about “If I win the lottery, I’m gonna…”
My contribution is usually, “If I win the lottery, I’m gonna thank the person who gave me that ticket.” Because I never buy them, but I have gotten them as gifts. I once won a dollar with one, but I didn’t think it was worth it to cash it in. So I did my part to help the economy, must have been someone else who screwed it up.
At nickel-ante poker games with my friends in my late 20s, I’d end up losing about $25 over the course of an evening, but that was four or five hours of talking with my friends, playing cards and eating this really great bean dip that one of them always brought. I suck at poker, but got really good ROI for $25.
Likewise, I don’t think anyone’s an idiot for buying lottery tickets. But some people think they can win, and the more they don’t win, the more convinced they are that they haven’t perfected their system, and they end up making up this whole world view that they actually deserve the money, well, they’re idiots. If you spend eight minutes’ salary on a diversion, that’s obviously just a lark, but if you spend 8 hours’ salary on that diversion, that’s a problem.
Arkansas doesn’t participate in the lottery system, but when I drive through a state that has it, I’ll usually stop off at a gas station and buy a couple of scratch-offs. I realize there’s not any money to be made in it, but hey, I won 10 bucks once!
And it’s fun from a novelty standpoint. If I lived somewhere where lottery was more common-place, I doubt I’d ever participate as much.
I haven’t bought one in years, but I used to buy one – and only one – ticket for each Lotto drawing. It was $1 as I recall, or maybe $2. (Never bought the scratch-off things.)
My reasoning was that buying one ticket increases your chances of winning from zero to negligible – an increase of essentially infinity, from nothing to something. As many have commented, it buys you participation in the daydream for very little cash.
A second ticket, or third or more, would further raise your chances by almost nothing, and would be a waste.
$1 for 1 ticket was fun. $2 was silly. At least, that was my logic.
I think you are assuming an actual increase in the marginal utility of money, where the real explanation is a human inability to conceptualise long odds.
People can conceptualise a one-in-ten and a one-in-two, but once the odds get long enough, they just think “I have a chance”. At that point, they start to vastly overestimate their chances, because they cease to be able to conceptualise the length of the odds, and can only conceptualise the fact that they have some chance.
If you say: “I’ll give you $1m if you take a one in a million chance of dying” people will take the chance because they think: “I have a chance of dying but I’ll probably get lots of money”.
If you say: “I’ll give you $10,000 if you take a one in a billion chance of dying” people won’t take it because they think: “I have a chance of dying and the payout isn’t really that much”. Even though they’d be better off taking the second option 100 times because they’d probably get the same amount of money as in the first option, but have one tenth the chance of dying.
Witness all the people in this thread who say they buy a ticket because they don’t have chance otherwise. Note how they don’t qualify that by talking about what chance they have. The chance they have may make it unlikely they will receive a payout if they bet each day before the heat death of the universe but that isn’t what they perceive: what they perceive is merely that they have a chance.
The “it gives me a good feeling” reasoning I can respect. Any justification based on any thought that you will actually receive more money than you will spend I can’t.
I mean, I know, intellectually, that when I visit the movies, I’m actually just seeing a sequence of static images smeared into the appearance of movement by the limitations of my perception, and that the things I see on the screen are fiction - scripted actions and dialogue, performed by actors, embellished with special effects, etc.
So if you understand how movies work, you won’t get much enjoyment from watching one? No. Life just isn’t like that. One can fully (or just mostly) understand something at an intellectual level, but still - viscerally, emotionally and yes - even intellectually - enjoy the illusions arising from it.
That’s about my speed. One of the women at work and I have a deal about splitting our massive win when the jackpot is huge. We buy $2 worth of tickets each when the pool is $20 million or more.
She doesn’t gamble on anything else. I however bet on racing and sports and managed to live for 10 years without working by making a consistent profit gambling. I have often explained to people that buying a lotto ticket gives you a tiny improvement in your chances of winning over the chance of winning with no ticket.
However I will not stop my deal with Annette, because we can irritate all the people at work on the day of each Lotto draw by doing this kind of stuff:
Me: Hey 'Nettie, should we pack up our stuff or just leave it for the replacements?
Annette: No just leave it. We can meet at the lotteries office tomorrow, I’m not coming back.
And really what other $2 bet can win you $10 million?
It’s definately a better bet than buying a wedding ring for example. Now there is a losing proposition that no-one bothers criticising.
Yeah - chiming in here to add to the tumult of consensus. Gambling has been described not as a risk but as a purchase the same as beer, but this time you are purchasing a set period of hope. And maybe, whith the world the way it is, that’s not such a bad purchase.
I must say though, that I basically NEVER gamble alone, but I got into the habit of joining the office lottery pool a while back, and now I can’t stop, because I just know they’ll win the first week I am out of the thing. If I never played and they didn’t win, nobody would think about the money I’d saved (probably even me), but the opposite would really suck. So I am a fully qualified idiot on that score.
I don’t get it. We spend money on stupid shit all the time. Sometimes we go to eat even when we could just as easily make the same thing at home for a quarter of the price just because it’s kind of fun to go out to eat. We get pedicures in winter when nobody is going to see our feet because we like to feel pampered. We buy $20.00 face plates for our cell phone just because we think it’d be fun if our cell phone was blue.
And sometimes we drop a buck on a lottery ticket- for me it’s nothing more than a moment of curiosity…what is behind that silver foil? What happens if I- for once in a sometimes pretty buttoned down life- do something stupid? Yeah, it’s not a ton of fun. But there aren’t many super-fun things that cost a buck, and lord knows I spend plenty of crap that doesn’t give me even a second of entertainment.
IMHO I think this argument is about class issues. Rich people many stupid things for no good reason except it’s a little bit fun.
Yes, granted. I get a great deal of enjoyment out of movies through forced suspension of disbelief–scenarios and situations that go beyond the unlikely into the impossible.
I suppose the way to use the movie analogy is that you and I can both watch an action adventure and put ourself in the position of the hero. We are James Bond. We are driving that car that turns into a submarine, and the girls are flinging themselves at us. But I can also kick back in a hammock in the yard and dream up my own persona, my own fancy cars, and my own pretty girls.
Spending cash on lottery tickets “so that you can participate in the dream” is buying into a carefully-designed marketing program. I’m sure you’re capable of relaxing on your couch at home, Mangetout, and imagining finding a million-dollar lottery ticket on the sidewalk, or some relative you don’t even know dying and leaving you a huge estate. People don’t NEED to buy lottery tickets to dream. The dream thing is just an excuse to help justify the gambling.
If you like to gamble, fine. But unless your brain is wired completely differently than mine, it doesn’t take a lottery ticket to dream for an hour.
I agree it is a marketing program (what isn’t??). I agree that you don’t need a lottery ticket to dream, but it is a legitimate, and decidedly NOT Stupid way to do it. A dream with a chance to actually win something is better than a dream that will never be anything more than a dream. An entertainment purchase of a dollar for a lotto ticket makes more sense than an entertainment purchase of $7.00 that, while possibly entertaining, won’t get you anything else no matter how many times you scratch on the ticket. Ditto with dreaming without any investment at all.
That in itself is the justification. And it’s not like people don’t win. It may be $2 or it may be $5 or it may be $1500 like Mr. K won. The stupidity doesn’t lie in the act of playing; the problem is when people drop 2/3 of their check on lotto tickets in hopes of tripling their money. The odds of that happening are slim. The odds of winning a couple bucks is much better.
Look, I don’t need to play golf to pretend I’m as good as Tiger Woods. I can just take a nap and dream. But it is more fun for me to actually play golf and think about being the next Tiger Woods.
I have a counterexample. The first lottery ticket I ever bought was in a pool while on a recruiting trip to my old university. One of the people in it was one of the world’s leading experts in combinatorics.
