You don't have to have bad math skills to play the lottery. For example, I am a mathematician who has on occasion chosen to purchase lottery tickets. And I see nothing at all irrational about this.
Oh, I'm not above buying the occasional ticket, either -- for that matter, I like playing Blackjack and view any losses incurred as entertainment.
However, people at the lower end of the income spend a lot more of their money (proportionally) on lottery tickets. [1]
And states are increasingly dependent on those revenues [2], which means in effect we've got a system where our schools become dependent on our lowest income population wasting money on what is essentially a pipe dream.
Note: I'm not saying "we've got to stop lotteries!" As I said: I play myself. Just noting that we are funding our government on the backs of people who are making what is arguably a terrible investment.
In other words: lotteries are a tax on people with bad math skills.
I used to buy one powerball ticket a week. About ten guys at work would pool together and buy ten tickets on the pretense of splitting it if we won.
We saw it pretty much exactly the way the article described. There'd almost always be an hour or two talking about what would be an interesting use of that much money, or talking about how stupid we were for playing the lottery, and it'd come back up over the work day.
We were paying for group amusement, and I still remember having a lot of fun with those conversations. I don't regret it any more than I regret spending money on a soda here or there during the same time period (long term health wise I regret the soda way more :) ).
