No one won Powerball. Next Wednesday's drawing... $1.3 BILLION

[SheilaT]

42. From what I've read, this is exactly

what the people running the lottery want: Fewer but higher jackpots.

If it were instead intended as a redistribution of the money, there would be many, many payouts of, say $1,000. Someone who knows more about this kind of math could probably post how to make it work that way.

But it's a mechanism for appealing to people's greed and lack of math sense. You should hear math teachers rail against lotteries.

Some years ago, I noticed that my then math teacher had a Powerball ticket on his desk. When I asked him why, he said he'd bought it to demonstrate to his statistics class how unlikely it was to get even ONE of the numbers, and this was back when there were twenty fewer numbers used than today. To his disgust, his ticket actually had one of that week's numbers on it. Never did ask him if he bought another ticket the next week to prove his point. It would have been rather hilarious if he'd won something, which would also prove the point of the randomness involved.