If the average American saw this, would there still be so many ticket sales?
Probably. We are terrible at assessing ourselves and making reasonable decisions. Daniel Gilbert wrote a whole book on the subject.
Gilbert has a serious argument to make about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy. Because of logic-processing errors our brains tend to make, we don't want the things that would make us happy — and the things that we want (more money, say, or a bigger house or a fancier car) won't make us happy.
A 2008 Carnegie-Mellon paper confirms the powerful allure of the lottery.
The study neatly illuminates the positive feedback loop of government-run lotteries. The games naturally appeal to poor people, which causes them to spend disproportionate amounts of their income on lotteries, which helps keep them poor, which keeps them buying tickets.
And finally, Daniel Kahneman's award winning book Thinking, Fast and Slow puts the icing on the cake:
the book highlights several decades of academic research to suggest that we place too much confidence in human judgment
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