So long as you weren’t hiding under a rock last Wednesday, Nov. 28, odds are that you were aware of the absurdly high Powerball and record-setting jackpot of $587.5 million. If that’s not enough to attract people to spend their last $2 on a lottery ticket, I don’t know what is.
The sight wasn’t one that is unfamiliar to me. I stopped to pick up a pack of cigarettes, some coffee and to grab some gas on my way to work. As I waited in line, I listened to each person order a lottery ticket. Some had custom filled forms with some arrangement of meaningful numbers, while others played their odds with an auto-pick from the machine.
So what are the odds of winning the Powerball, you ask? You’d assume they’ve got to be good considering how so many people — people who can barely afford to put gas in the tank, pack their kids lunches and maybe take the family out to eat once a month — spend their last $2, $10 or $20 on Powerball tickets. But they’re not. The odds of winning a Powerball jackpot are 1 in 175,223,510.
The Huffington Post cited 15 things that are more likely to happen than winning the lottery just before the record-setting drawing last week. Among them were birthing identical quadruplets, dying from being left-handed and dying in an asteroid apocalypse. And though the end of the Mayan calendar has gathered quite a bit of media attention, many people played their odds hoping they’d win the Powerball and miss out on the asteroid apocalypse.
Earlier this year, Powerball officials doubled the price of a single lottery ticket from $1 to $2, aiming to increase revenue and jackpot sizes, at which they’ve certainly succeeded, as it seems that there is always a new jackpot lottery up for grabs for some lucky winner(s).
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all about dreaming and hoping, I even split a $2 ticket with a friend from work. Yet there still seems something inherently broken with our understanding of things to be spending money on something with such astronomically low odds. The odds of winning a horse race range from 95.23 percent to .99 percent and I’ve always been told my odds in Vegas are 3 to 1. Yet the odds of winning the Powerball are .0000000005705 percent (1 in 175,223,510), and we are much more apt to buy a $2 ticket than plan a trip to the races or rent a suite on the strip in Vegas.
Perhaps we have become too greedy. We’ve become accustomed and entitled, expecting that we can work our day-to-day until we strike gold and get to take the rest of our lives off while living like a celebrity. The American dream used to consist of graduating high school — maybe college — so we could get a solid bill-paying job where we could support a family and eventually put a down payment on a house we could call our own. Yet now we expect to be able to strike it rich and never have to look back.
We no longer wish to work hard to get to an acceptable place in life that we can be proud of. We’ve seen too many Justin Biebers rise up that come from nothing only to be making $300,000 per concert.
The reason our Powerball is increasingly reaching record levels is because Americans are looking to get rich quick. We want our cake made for us and served to us, all while we cry at our party because we want to. And that’s OK, because while Americans continue to spend their questionably hard-earned dollars on a wasted lottery, immigrants and forward thinking individuals will be focused on the real American dream until they can laugh themselves all the way to the bank.
Reach the columnist at caleb.varoga@asu.edu or follow him at@calebvaroga
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