Ask HN: NY lottery $500 Million - Why do people insist on buying tickets?

Probably have a better chance hitting the lottery than striking gold creating a startup.

It's rational. Sometimes. If the expected value is more than a dollar, and the ticket costs a dollar, you should buy a ticket : See: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/do_the_math/2001/08/is_po...

If you limit it to about two dollars a year it's also a cheap entertainment to fantasize about hitting the numbers.

Otherwise it's a tax on people who can't do math.

The math is quite simple:

The probability of winning millions from a lottery is greater than the probability of making millions from working (for most people).

It's not the NY lottery, but a multistate lottery called "MegaMillions". And people buy tickets for many reasons. Neverminding "being rich seems awesome," I imagine the two chief reasons are:

-They can afford to throw away a few bucks every now and then.

-They know they have no opportunity to be so wealthy otherwise.