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Being a Murder Victim v. Winning The Lottery: Calculating Happiness

Submitted by tonyplant on October 4, 2006 - 10:26.

Single lottery tickedI was intrigued to come across a ready-reckoner for calculating the size that a US lottery jackpot needs to be before it is worth the investment of a one dollar ticket. The values need to be adjusted to account for UK jackpots and the greater price of a UK ticket. It's a pretty sobering read to drill down into what the return has to be to justify the expenditure of a dollar.

...for a $1.00 ticket, the amount of the grand prize had to be at least equal to the odds for winning it. In the case of the Powerball lottery, that means the grand prize has to be at least worth $120,526,660 to make the value of the benefit worth the $1.00 cost of the risk.

According to this source, the jackpot has to be more than 120 million dollars to justify buying a 1 dollar ticket. So, very roughly (using all my fingers and toes), that means we need a jackpot of around 102 million pounds to make it worth the financial risk of investing 1 pound. Of course, this doesn't take different population sizes into account, it's just a straight conversion at the exchange rate of 1.40 dollars to the pound.

I have previously quoted the figure (I read it in a news summary) that we are 14x more likely to be murdered than to win the lottery. And I have used that as an argument that we are theory poor if our sole response to "What would make you happy?" is "Winning the lottery".

read more | add new comment | victim | unlikely events | murder | lottery | jane eyre-ity | happystance | happiness


Being a Murder Victim v. Winning The Lottery: Calculating Happiness

Submitted by tonyplant on March 4, 2006 - 15:46.

Single lottery tickedI was intrigued to come across a ready-reckoner for calculating the size that a US lottery jackpot needs to be before it is worth the investment of a one dollar ticket. The values need to be adjusted to account for UK jackpots and the greater price of a UK ticket. It's a pretty sobering read to drill down into what the return has to be to justify the expenditure of a dollar.

...for a $1.00 ticket, the amount of the grand prize had to be at least equal to the odds for winning it. In the case of the Powerball lottery, that means the grand prize has to be at least worth $120,526,660 to make the value of the benefit worth the $1.00 cost of the risk.

According to this source, the jackpot has to be more than 120 million dollars to justify buying a 1 dollar ticket. So, very roughly (using all my fingers and toes), that means we need a jackpot of around 102 million pounds to make it worth the financial risk of investing 1 pound. Of course, this doesn't take different population sizes into account, it's just a straight conversion at the exchange rate of 1.40 dollars to the pound.

I have previously quoted the figure (I read it in a news summary) that we are 14x more likely to be murdered than to win the lottery. And I have used that as an argument that we are theory poor if our sole response to "What would make you happy?" is "Winning the lottery".

1 attachment | read more | add new comment | victim | unlikely events | murder | lottery | jane eyre-ity | happystance | happiness


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