deepstash
Beta
Deepstash brings you key ideas from the most inspiring articles like this one:
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
The Psychology Of Lotteries
4
Key Ideas
Save all ideas
Lotteries
The lottery is cheap permission to dream about the possibility of a better life. Most players know they won't win.
People without lots of money are more likely to participate in lotteries. On average, households that make less than $12,400 a year spend 5 % of their income on state lotteries, making it a deeply regressive tax.
66 SAVES
146 READS
More likely to buy tickets
In an experiment, low-income participants were more likely to purchase lottery tickets when they felt that their income was low compared to a perceived standard.
53 SAVES
131 READS
Changing the lottery system
There is clearly a demand for playing the lottery. But low-income people spend more of their income on the lottery than other income groups.
- A solution would be to stop marketing and advertising lotteries that target the poor.
- States could promote and offer more games that appeal to wealthier players.
- Financial institutions could issue investment instruments that have lottery-like qualities.
51 SAVES
129 READS
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
9
Key Ideas
Winning A Lottery
Human beings are not wired to grasp the concept of probability. A chance of winning a lottery, sometimes 1 in 175 million, is not something that bothers us.
The Lottery ti...
The Steady Appeal of The Lottery
The steady appeal of the lottery is due to various psychological tricks by the marketers: suspension of logic and reason and the dreams that it sells.
Using the variable rewards concept of psychology, the marketers ensure that people keep buying their tickets for years, by introducing smaller wins with much better odds. This helped lottery buyers experience the thrill of a win.
Playing the Lottery for Entertainment
The odds to win are so small that winning does not even feature in our decision matrix of buying a ticket. The game of lottery isn’t played on logic, or for investment, but for entertainment.
For as little as two dollars, a person dreams of getting a chance to win thousands of dollars, and that dream is worth the price of the ticket. The bigger the jackpot is, the more the dreams are fed.
1
Key Idea
Deep Play
The End of Work in the coming decades may give way to the rise of 'Deep Play', elaborate virtual reality games mixed with religion, consumerism and other ideologies.
7
Key Ideas
Money And Happiness
The debate about how material belongings can get in the way of our happiness dates back hundreds of years:
- The Buddha talked about a balance between asceticism and pleasure.
The Hedonic Treadmill
The things we buy might make us happy in the moment, but that feeling fades away over time. This phenomenon is called the “hedonic treadmill."
We get used to things that we have, and when new, more attractive things catch our eye, we feel like we need to keep getting more stuff to maintain those feelings.
Money: Happiness Vs Misery
- Happiness is a really difficult topic to study, because it’s subjective, unstable, and intangible.
- Affluence has a certain impact on our well-being when it comes to satisfying our basic needs and standard of living, but in general, research shows that it is a weak predictor of happiness.
- Researchers agree on is this: there are ways to spend our money that are more likely to elicit joy.