Welcome back.

If you haven't seen, there is a billion dollar lottery jackpot and I just checked this morning

apparently somebody has won it so congratulations to the newest billionaire it's one of the largest lottery

jackpots in history and of course the odds of winning a jackpot are ridiculously low.

The math nerds apparently put the odds that you will win that billion dollar jackpot at

one in 292 million, which I checked is roughly 19,000 times less likely than being struck by

lightning in your lifetime.

You're 19,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than

win this jackpot. But what's astounding about lotteries when you dig into them that I imagine will shock a lot of people listening to this,

for a reason I'll explain in a second, is how much money Americans spend on the lottery.

It is wild. In 2023 Americans spent more than a hundred

billion dollars on state-run lotteries. The economists recently pointed out that if that were a company

making a hundred billion dollars in revenue it would be the ninth largest company in the

world. Some other ways to contextualize this that I

thought about. The iPhone, the most successful consumer product in history

effectively, is a $200 billion per year business

worldwide.

While Americans spend $100 billion a year on Scratcher tickets on the lottery, One other way to think about this is that this billion dollar

lottery ticket, just this one prize that was recently won, is more than nine states spend on their K-12

education per year. It's just an insane amount of money that Americans spend on

lotteries.

And I've pointed us out before.

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