[patton]

First, calculate the expected value of the ticket, compared to ticket cost.

Then, examine the marginal cost of the ticket, measured against the buyer’s cost utility function.

This can go on for days, but the point is -

Can you spare the cost of the ticket?

What is the value of your dreams, until you discover that you (most likely) have lost?

Of course, the state lotteries are in business to distort all of this, so that folks spend silly amounts they can’t afford on farfetched odds.

But the idea of a lotto, in and of itself, is no more evil than the idea of a gun.

[Gondring]

But the idea of a lotto, in and of itself, is no more evil than the idea of a gun.

Exactly.

I fear, however, that I lack the formal education in such matters that would allow me to attach the correct terminology to the concepts I wish to convey.

What would it be called, if there's a minimum amount that one would consider "sufficient winnings"? For example, a person might eschew a scratch-off ticket with a more likely but more modest payout, choosing only to participate in lotteries that might make a sufficiently large jump in lifestyle to risk the benefit that dollar might give by being spent in a normal manner.

[TCats]

Agree that a Lotto is not inherently Evil. However, when you involve the Gov’t in promoting and siphoning off pay-ins it goes outside the boundaries of ethics IMO. These are scams that employ thousands, provide relatively little to the objects they were created to serve and ultimately drain the finances of those least able to afford it but most susceptible to the scam itself.

In many respects it is just another, legalized form of Three Card Monty that plays on the weaknesses of a largely low-income, uneducated segment of the population.