How to Win the Lottery
We don’t have a Friday Chat scheduled for today — if you’d like to volunteer, email nicole@thebillfold.com — so instead I’m going to suggest you read Highline’s “Jerry and Marge Go Large.”
You know that old saying “the lottery is a tax on people who can’t do math?” Well, Jerry does the math on a particular type of lottery — the kind where, if nobody matches all the numbers and wins the big jackpot, the money gets distributed among the people who matched some of the numbers — and figures out how many tickets he’ll need to buy to get a guaranteed return on his investment. (Spoiler alert: he’s buying hundreds of thousands of tickets per lottery.)
Meanwhile, a few other people (including a group of MIT students) do the same math… and that’s when things get interesting.
Support The Billfold
The Billfold continues to exist thanks to support from our readers. Help us continue to do our work by making a monthly pledge on Patreon or a one-time-only contribution through PayPal.
Comments