Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes Thread March 2015 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Vaniver 02 March 2015 11:38PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (233)
Tags: quotes

Comments (233)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Vaniver 09 March 2015 03:58:43PM 9 points [-]

Someone else follows the citation trail and claims the source thinks the actual number is lower:

households with an income of less than $10 000 spend, on average, approximately 3% of their income on the lottery.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 09 March 2015 09:46:18PM 5 points [-]

$300/year (unless someone is a bored millionaire) is still shocking to me.

Comment author: Nornagest 09 March 2015 09:51:11PM *  3 points [-]

Assume a flat distribution from 0 to 10000 and it's $150 a year, or about a lottery ticket and a half per week at $2 a ticket. Not too unreasonable. But on the other hand, you've got to figure lottery spending's unevenly distributed, probably following something along the lines of the 80/20 rule, and that brings us back to a ticket a day or higher.

Comment author: gjm 09 March 2015 10:21:34PM *  4 points [-]

Seems plenty unreasonable to me. If your income is somewhere on "a flat distribution from 0 to $10000" then you are probably just barely getting by, and perpetually one minor financial difficulty away from disaster. If you were able to save $150/year, that could make a really substantial difference to your financial resilience.

(Though I don't much like pronouncing from my quite comfortable position on how those in poverty should spend their money. It's liable to sound like a claim of superiority, but in fact I do plenty of stupid and counterproductive things and it's entirely possible that if I were suddenly thrown into poverty I'd manage much worse than those people; I doubt I'd be buying lottery tickets, but I'd probably be making other mistakes that they don't.)

[EDITED to fix a bit of incredibly clunky writing style.]

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 10 March 2015 08:48:54AM *  1 point [-]

It still break my formerly favourite analogy, movie tickets -- I don't think the average household making <$10k/year spends $150/year on movie tickets. (Some such households probably do, but I strongly doubt the average one does.)

Comment author: [deleted] 10 March 2015 02:24:38PM 4 points [-]

But more on booze, probably, otherwise how could they bear it.

Comment author: johnlawrenceaspden 11 March 2016 07:53:49PM 1 point [-]

A family of four can probably blow $50 seeing one movie.

Comment author: Lumifer 09 March 2015 04:09:21PM *  7 points [-]

Upvoted for checking claims :-)

The link actually says that he cannot find the original source for the 9% number, but in the process found a 3% number.

I'll dig around for better numbers if I have time, but we can also look at significance from the other end:

State lotteries have become a significant source of revenue for the states, raising $17.6 billion in profits for state budgets in the 2009 fiscal year (FY) with 11 states collecting more revenue from their state lottery than from their state corporate income tax during FY2009.

(Wikipedia)

P.S. An interesting paper. Notable quotes:

The introduction of a state lottery is associated with a decline of $115 per quarter in household non-gambling consumption. This figure implies a monthly reduction of $23 in per-adult consumption, which compares to average monthly sales of $18 per lottery-state adult. The response is most pronounced for low-income households, which on average reduce non-gambling consumption by three percent. Among households in the lowest income third of the CEX sample, the data demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in expenditures on food eaten in the home (3.1 percent) and on home mortgage, rent, and other bills (6.9 percent).

And also

Based on 1998 sales data compiled by LeFleurs Inc., adults living in lottery states averaged $226 annually on lottery tickets. In contrast, CEX Diary respondents living in lottery states report an average of $0.71 for the two-week interval. Assuming smooth annual expenditures, this implies mean annual lottery expenditures of only $36. The underreporting is so severe that magnitudes implied by an analyses of this data are not reliable.

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 09 March 2015 09:48:39PM 5 points [-]

Okay, now I can see where all the people giving financial reasons why lotteries are bad are coming from.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit