I found a little article in Scientific American of April 2025: Is the Lottery Ever a Good Bet? – by Jack Murtagh.
It starts with this:
Here is a thought challenge for you: Let’s say I have chosen a particular moment in time from the past nine years. I am thinking of a specific (and totally random) year, month, day, hour, minute and second between April of 2016 and today. Could you guess it? No chance? You have a better chance of guessing a specific second from a nine-year span than you have of winning Powerball.
I thought that short quote was a very powerful visualization of the odds of the lottery.
Clearly, playing the lottery is never a good bet, but it’s not about winning. I know too many people in Germany who have spent their entire lives, since I was a child, buying that Lotto ticket every week, and they still do it now, even in their eighties. “One day I might win!”
The lottery is not about winning, it’s about dreaming. The dream of possibly winning gives people hope and encouragement, and a will to move forward, even in adversity.
It’s about the hope.
Haha, yes, I remember the Truth About Lotto and tell that story now and again. When promoting the book in forums, the pushback wasn’t from the logical data in the book you wrote, rather that we were deflating their dreams! Such an interesting time those years.
Yep, good book. Bad message.
Interesting that you show up as “Someone” like many others. I never know which someone says what. Maybe you need to sign comments with WC.