The typical lottery is a revenue device: it is intended to get money to the operator of the lottery, rather than any one of the participants. My state's lottery, for example, takes in 40% of revenue as profits, commissions, or operations costs. From a basic search, this does not seem atypical. It's also a sign that this is a very high-friction investment method, even compared to most other random investment methods. Once received, the lottery jackpot is taxed as income or worse-than-income rates, adding further friction.
You'd also need to spend the money relatively well, either to prevent death or so you get significantly more value from the sum than the 'losers' would have from spending the money in other ways. I'm not entirely sure that's the obvious, at least not for most circumstances. ((Worse, rich people tend to have or develop more expensive tastes. If you can't avoid that, the return becomes even more expensive.))
I'm also unsure this is an effective strategy, even taking the rather esoteric assumptions required and the pure utilitarianism. I'd value one person living an addition ten years over fifty or five hundred or fifty million people being slightly inconvenienced, but with sufficiently large numbers the ethics may start going the other way around : you can't discount experiences because someone will end up dead, because it's quite possible all of your MWI selves end up dead eventually.
I haven't been able to find the source of the idea, but I've recently been reminded of:
This is, of course, based on the Multiple Worlds Interpretation: if the lottery has one-in-a-million odds, then for every million timelines in which you buy a lottery ticket, in one timeline you'll win it. There's a certain amount of friction - it's not a perfect wealth transfer - based on the lottery's odds. But, looked at from this perspective, the question of "should I buy a lottery ticket?" seems like it might be slightly more complicated than "it's a tax on idiots".
But I'm reminded of my current .sig: "Then again, I could be wrong." And even if this is, in fact, a valid viewpoint, it brings up further questions, such as: how can the friction be minimized, and the efficiency of the transfer be maximized? Does deliberately introducing randomness at any point in the process ensure that at least some of your MWI-selves gain a benefit, as opposed to buying a ticket after the numbers have been chosen but before they've been revealed?
How interesting can this idea be made to be?