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Oct. 24, 2018 / 2:19 AM GMT
By Vivian Manning-Schaffel
Have you bought your Mega Millions tickets yet? With more than $1.6B (yes, billion) in the Mega Millions jackpot and over $620M in the Powerball jackpot, lottery fever is at an all-time high. Yet, your chances of winning are only a truly miraculous 1-in-302.6 million for the Mega Millions, and your chance of winning Powerball is something around 1-in-292 million. And the chance of winning both lotteries? Something like, 1-in-88 quadrillion, according to CNBC.
Even with the chances of winning so minute, so many of us can’t resist tossing away more even money in hopes of landing the big payoff. So why do we keep trying?
For one, on some level, we all believe that money buys happiness. A recent Swedish study found — surprise, surprise — that winning the lottery (as opposed to losing) really does lead to greater life satisfaction (although it doesn’t seem to change the winners’ day-to-day happiness). It’s no wonder people who can least afford to play are also the most likely to spend money to get in the game. A study published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making found when people are made to feel subjectively poor, they end up buying more lottery tickets. And a 1999 Duke University research paper found that people in Virginia who made between $25k-$50k a year spent more than $91M on Lotto tickets, where people who made more than $50k spent close to $70M and people who made $15k-$25k spent $35M.
Timothy M.D. Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program says this discrepancy might come down to availability. For example, he says lottery tickets are sold in liquor stores which are more often found in lower-income neighborhoods. Fong cautions against a commonly repeated phrase — that the “lottery is a tax on the math impaired.” He chalks it up to classism. “There’s no truth to this whatsoever,” Fong says.
According to a 2016 Gallup poll, roughly half of Americans reported buying a lottery ticket within the last year.
Jackpots have grown bigger over the decades
Since the 1960s, states have legalized lotteries to raise money. David G. Schwartz, Ph.D., director of the Center for Gaming Research and Instructor at the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says, at first, lotteries weren’t advertised and drawings were rarely held. But come the 1970s, New Jersey switched over to daily, easy-to-access drawings and when revenues grew quickly, other states quickly adopted the same model, says Schwartz.
“At first, a million-dollar jackpot was considered big news, but as time went on, players became less excited by the possibility of winning ‘only’ a few million dollars,” he explains. Today’s gigantic jackpots stem from the late 1980s with the establishment of multi-state lotteries, which can offer jackpots surpassing $1B. The more states that join a particular lottery, the more people play and the bigger the potential jackpot — hence the currently mega Mega Millions and powerful Powerball.
The bigger the jackpot, the slimmer the odds. So why do we all want in on it?
Fong says what we’re really buying is the fantasy that we might win, as opposed to really believing we will. “Americans love frenzy,” he says. “We love spectacular scenes and big events. When you think about it, lining up to buy lottery tickets is completely unnecessary, but people do it because they want to be a part of the spectacle. It’s a cultural thing.”