Tangent: I always thought state sanctioned lotteries were highly immoral. Sure, they want the tax revenue, but poor people are disproportionately the victims of what feels like fraud. The people believe that have a chance at winning what they most certainly do not. It's like reverse welfare- taxing the poor and uneducated for the benefit of the masses.
Not at all. In fact, I wrote this up because of a conversation I had a while back with a man buying a lottery ticket at the gas station. I was talking with him about how bad the odds were, and he fully admitted that he was getting terrible odds on that dollar.
But he figured that on the one in a million chance that he hit the jackpot, even if he only saw a quarter of that amount he could actually get out of debt and start making the power of compound interest work for him instead of against him, and after enough time with that money in the bank, the scales would tip in favor of spending the dollar on the lottery ticket.
Now, I don't think that argument really holds water, and I told him so (for several reasons, even apart from my skepticism that he'd actually put any cash he won into a properly managed account without spending a huge chunk of it first; the odds at the lottery are so hideous and the doubling time for a quarter million that you're also drawing money out of to live off of is very long, so it would be tough to make those numbers work out), but it got me started thinking about whether there might actually be situations where a losing gamble could be worthwhile, depending on the current situation of indebtedness.