Despite long odds, Powerball ticket buyers pursuing 鈥榯he dream鈥�
Visions of sugar plums may be dancing in a lot of heads right now, but for some people they are being accompanied by visions of mansions, sports cars, pricey vacations and comfy retirements.
It’s all due to the fact that the Powerball jackpot has reached $1.2 billion after Monday’s drawing did not produce a winner. The lottery, which encompasses all of the United States except for Alaska, Hawaii, Utah, Nevada and Alabama, has at least 181 million players. The next drawing is today at 10:59 p.m., so many of those millions of people will be staying up to see if they can pay off their mortgage and student loans, shuck off their job and start thinking about a wine cellar and their preferred brand of caviar.
Many people who purchase Powerball tickets at the Medicine Shoppe in Washington have been snapping up more of them because of the enormous jackpot, according to an employee who asked not to be named.
“They’ll buy five instead of one,” she said.
It was the same at Nickman’s Drug in Lemont Furnace.
“They all have the dream,” said Kathy Danko, an employee.
The odds are, however, that the dream will not become reality. According to Powerball, a player’s chances of winning tonight are 1 in 292 million. To put that in perspective, we all have a 1 in 10 million chance of becoming president, and a 1 in 1.5 million chance of becoming a movie star. There is, in fact, a far greater likelihood that you will be struck by lightning in the next 12 months – the odds of that are 1 in a million – than winning the billion-dollar Powerball jackpot.
So why do people play if their odds of success are infinitesimally small? There is a raft of academic literature out there explaining what drives the buyers of Powerball and other lottery tickets. Benjamin Lockwood, an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told the journal Knowledge at Wharton last summer that “people enjoy playing the lottery and it’s important to take that seriously.”
He added, “It’s a mistake to think only about the probabilities of winning and prize values in the same way it would be a mistake to try to understand whether video games are good or bad by focusing only on the quality of the graphics.”
Some research indicates that buying lottery tickets is simply a form of entertainment for many participants and they enjoy dreaming about winning even if they know the odds are extraordinarily long.
Lockwood told Knowledge at Wharton that he was skeptical about lotteries before he started his research, but that “one thing I became convinced of is the real enjoyment people get out of them.”