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Comment by ArtWomb | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking about this in light of the recent MegaMillions lottery frenzy. Chance of buying a winning ticket is about one in a million times the number of successive draws in which no winner is declared in order for the jackpot to reach a sizeable pot. Ballpark estimate around 1:10M.

Whereas the chance you could actually build a company with billion dollar valuation is probably well under 1:1M. Just from being in the pool of startup school attendees or auditors. There are additionally many other factors which could substantially increase those odds.

Also, would just like to mention the recent podcast with Laura Deming of Longevity Fund was excellent. Incredibly informative and reasonably optimistic about the probability of a breakthrough in our lifetimes.

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Of course the odds of building a company to 1B are better, because of the work involved. Buying a lottery ticket takes a couple of minutes of work and $2 at most.

Building a billion dollar company takes generally 10+ years of work (and even if you're YouTube, 1.5 years) and also probably a lot of your own money, at least in opportunity cost if not actual money.

Odds in a lottery are uniform and do not account for personal attributes. Assuming 1 ticket per person, anyone that buys a ticket has an equal chance of winning. A 98 year old grandmother has the same chance of winning as a 21 year old man.

Odds of starting a successful startup do not follow the same rules. There are a small number of people with the skillset/connections/etc to start a successful startup and thus have a very high chance of success, and a large number of people without those attributes, and thus a very low, if not zero percentage chance of success.

One small caveat is if someone is very wealthy, they can spend $0.9Billion buying lottery tickets which increases their odds vs someone that just buys 1

Also, building a company is not all or nothing. You could even shoot smaller and likely get to $1M in revenue for a $5M or so company. The odds are much better.

The odds of winning a lottery (lets say the Mega Millions or the Diversity Visa) are, to an extent, evenly distributed. The odds of succeeding in a social endeavour (lets say a business or a Green Card obtained via application) are not.

While on average the odds of the latter (the business) may be better, for a given person (which is always me and never an average person) the odds of the former (the lottery) may actually be much higher.

On a side note, while it may seem "un-meritocratic" to the HN crowd, having lotteries as gateways to social mobility and resource allocation is a decent idea.

My concern for thinking of lotteries as a societal benefit is that my (in no way perfect) observations is that the lowest in income, and education tend to <i>contribute</i> the most money towards the lottery which may have had a greater net benefit if each ticket buyer had spent their buy in price on themselves.

Also consider that poorer lottery winners are often ill equipped to deal with their winnings and frequently lose the entire sum of money within a few years; they may enjoy spending the money, but it doesn't lift a winners children and community out of a cycle of poverty as I would normally think of "social mobility".

Maybe we should randomly force people to get an MBAs instead.

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