All of Tim_Worstall's Comments + Replies

I partially AWYC, but unless there's some aspect to the experience that I don't get, I don't see why actually buying the lottery ticket is necessary. Going to a movie helps one escape into fantasy. A lottery ticket seems like a much less helpful prop for this. I can - and have, particularly as a child - fantasize about what I would do with wealth and status (although the means of achieving such, in my fantasies, has generally been the slightly lesser improbability of becoming a famous author or something similar) completely unaided. In fact, it might be better to do as I did and imagine achieving your incredible wealth by some means other than lottery winnings, precisely because winning the lottery is so improbable. Thanks to a horrifying history of akrasia on that front and some amount of realization that I really want to do science instead, I haven't actually made any effective moves towards becoming an author, but nevertheless it is, I think, an accepted fact that people will be more motivated to do what they fantasize about. Why not let them be motivated to do something actually useful?

Even if that's the justification, you can do better: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hl/lotteries_a_waste_of_hope/ It's not clear that lotteries are a good use of time: you aren't thinking 24/7 about your dreams, you dream for maybe a few minutes total, and from that perspective, $1 is far too much to pay when you can, say, download a totally engrossing movie from the Internet for $0. And that argument still serves to ban more gambling than say $10 a day, which many gamblers routinely violate.

Yes, I agree. Part of my brain does not understand the difference between a small chance of something happening and a really small chance of something happening. Probably the same thing is true of most people, including PhD economists. It's doesn't seem unreasonable to spend $10 a year to humor one's inner moron. It might be a different story if those same PhD economists were spending thousands of dollars a year on lottery tickets. But even then, the most likely explanation is that the PhD economist has a gambling problem. And like most addicts, he knows that he's behaving irrationally; he just has a hard time controlling himself.