I buy one lottery ticket for the main Saturday draw each week
Not because I expect to win a few millions
Not because some of the money goes to Good Causes. In fact if I ever stop my regular purchase it will be because I am unable any longer to close my eyes to the cynicism of this side of it - the fat cat bureaucracy & army of paid consultant/advisers helping bewildered local groups trying to make sense of the application process. Not to mention the even greater cynicism of giving obscene amounts to the Royal Opera, the Churchills, or the Olympics
I buy the small pleasure of imagining what I would do with the money. What better small pleasure could I buy with my £? And I cannot think of a £52 treat that it would be worth saving up & waiting all year for
For the game to work, it must be a chance of winning a few million £s
There are those who say the odds against winning are so long as to make my chance of winning indistinguishable from zero. But this is to argue from the absolute level of probability
Medics & media constantly urge us to act on the basis of relative risks. Most recently & most ludicrously to foreswear the pleasure of bacon sandwiches for a higher probability of freedom from bowel cancer
My risk of winning the lottery may be zero if I do not buy a ticket. Or maybe not. I choose to assign a probability of 1 in 2,500 googols to the chance that I will pick up a winning ticket in the street or find that a friend offers me a half share of their multimillion jackpot. That makes the relative gain from my £1 into a satisfactorily large number. Much greater than that assigned to giving up bacon sandwiches
