Tonight is the $480 million Mega Millions drawing. Perhaps you secretly bought a ticket or two. How large is this Lottery by historic standards, and what causes people to be excited in the Lottery tonight versus other times? We briefly explore that below, along with providing some updates on this website’s new subscription feed options.
Mini Millions
The current $480 million jackpot is a top 21 lottery [Mega Millions or Powerball] ever, and top 10 if only looking at Mega Millions. We showed in our article last week that such a lottery size is high by post-pandemic standards!
There is at least a quarter chance someone will win tonight as well, but if not the jackpot is on path to potentially to over $600 million by this time next week. Still, we showed the recent lottery system is not designed to simply grow as much as in the pre-pandemic era. It is unlikely to again get to a billion dollars, for example.
This past year we are averaging only $20 million spending per Mega Millions draw, versus $40 million per draw in 2018]. Resulting in only an average $40 million jackpot increase per draw, versus $60 million per draw in a typical billion-dollar trajectory.
Why did we get here? The thirst for gambling [or even fantasizing about getting rich quick] hasn’t vanished. It’s just that the pandemic has altered the gaming landscape [and other industries] in unexpected ways. Sometimes things don’t return, and sometimes that too is for the best. There are other speculation vehicles that have grown, from online casinos, online sports betting, or even new-era financial markets [with cryptocurrencies, NFTs, SPACs, etc]
We stated a year ago that there is no bounds in innovative new ways... to lose money.
The only invention I see...
— Salil Mehta (@salilstatistics) June 2, 2021
Is a new way to lose money.
Interestingly, while we often focus only on the jackpot levels, the middle prizes are of interest. What are those tickets worth? As an odd experiment, we saw some large states offered their own lotteries during the pandemic, as an incentive to increase stalled vaccinations.
If slightly less than half of the population people would be happy winning even $1 million [or even $50,000], then surely this same population would to some degree gladly vaccinate and help America reach “herd immunity” threshold. Didn’t fully work out that way in reality.
Prizes were awarded nearly a year ago, which roughly scale to the values and probabilities below [which I calculated for two large state vaccine lottery programs].
$50,000+ prizes:
CA Vaccine Lottery, 1 in 240,000
NY Vaccine Lottery, 1 in 400,000
Mega Millions or Powerball, 1 in 2.5 million
$1 million+ prizes:
CA Vaccine Lottery, 1 in 1 million
NY Vaccine Lottery, 1 in 1.5 million
Mega Millions or Powerball, 1 in 2.5 million
So in summary your “free” ticket had an over 5x greater chance of winning at least $50,000 versus a similar Mega Millions or Powerball lottery ticket. And an over 1.5x greater chance of winning at least $1 million versus a similar Mega Millions or Powerball lottery ticket.
People who love the lottery, but were opposed to the vaccine [even if it would save their own life], were not moved by the financial potential of what was essentially a 2 lottery tickets [and 3 tickets in the end with lower than expected turnout for such prizes]. Many incentives were tried at the local level, many sticks were applied too [including the loss of one’s job]. But the hype of the lottery didn’t carry over as an intangible value, high enough to sway a bulk of Americans.
We’ll have to explore more about the probability intersection of these various gambling theatres [lottery, casinos, sports] some point again soon. Showing clarity on which gambling methods have the greatest “return”.
New subscription feed
Thank you to my many thousands of followers on this particular website. People follow by e-mail, RSS, and other mechanisms. And I am grateful for the years of support and engagement. Last year we mentioned that Google's Feedburner was shutting down, and I finally had a chance last weekend to upgrade to new solutions that easily work for most people.
As a result, some unknown number of people may have missed last week’s lottery article, which you are encouraged to look at. And at the bottom of this article we have other mechanisms for people to support this website, including something as simple as confirming their e-mail subscription or sharing this article with a friend.
Over the past year however, while this specific website was in resting-mode between upgrades, there have been some interesting news on the person front. Here are some highlights.
I did a podcast with my friend Anthony Scaramucci earlier this year:
And while it was the rare one he did with a statistician, it was among his most watched as well.
Our social media feed had been quite active on the devastating coronavirus news, tracking the calamity ensued from the delta and then omicron variants. As a family we all vaccinated per my own highly-utilized public calculator [and I personally continued to exercise and lose over 25 pounds!], but the human toll and suffering continues to follow predications we made in the early months of 2020.
I also spent time advising the leadership of the Department of Justice and providing private statistical analysis useful for their work. It was an interesting experience, in light of the social changes occuring. Including the traumatic events with Russia, happening during that time.
We were also quoted in the mainstream news a couple times as well, focusing on probability theory as it relates to market crashes, as well as context around economic recession probability.
The first one was a cover article by the head of WSJ’s Market Watch.
Cited in this weekend's cover story in WSJ Market Watch. A larger drop can happen. Know if the catalysts exist.
— Salil Mehta (@salilstatistics) January 23, 2022
Read @mdecambre column here. https://t.co/DSfnoqousu pic.twitter.com/fVk9d7xZ7d
The second one was a cover article in the New York Times.
my mira reading my name in @nytimes pic.twitter.com/Rptc4qJ7HH
— Salil Mehta (@salilstatistics) June 19, 2022
Wherever you are, I hope you’ll stay safe, happy, and healthy. Be in touch. I tend to respond quicker to public comments, though I always respond to private messages as well.
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