The instant payout is about $496 million so that makes the expected value 496*1/292.2=$1.70. We also have to adjust for the possibility that more than one person wins the prize. [...] with so many people playing it wouldn’t be surprising if two people had the same number–I give it at least 25%. So that knocks your winnings down to $372 million in expectation.
In a word, no.
Approximately 300 million tickets have been sold for this draw, and there are 292 million possible combinations. That means that on average, at least one winning ticket has already been sold (could be zero, could be two or three, but one is the most likely outcome).
Tabarrok's error is that he is looking at the likelihood of two winners in general. Which is a very different question than "Assuming I have the winning combination, what is the likelihood that zero of the other 300 million tickets are winners?" The two events are independent; my having the winning numbers does not reduce the chances of the other 300 million tickets winning. The odds that if you won, you'd have to share the prize are well over 50%, not 25%.
For related ruminations on the other big multi-state lottery game, Mega Millions, see here.
Scott A. Norris, an assistant professor of mathematics at Southern Methodist University, said there's no trick to playing the lottery, but your tiny odds of winning are a bit better if you let the computer pick rather than choosing yourself. That's because when people use birthdates or other favorite figures, they generally choose numbers 31 or below. That ignores the fact that there are 69 numbered balls.
“We are helpless and not being able to do anything against this deliberate destruction to the oil installations. NOC urges all faithful and honorable people of this homeland to hurry to rescue what is left from our resources before it is too late.”
That’s from Libya’s National Oil Corp and as you might have guessed, it references the seizure of state oil assets by Islamic State, whose influence in the country has grown over the past year amid the power vacuum the West created by engineering the demise of Moammar Qaddafi.
"The successful man is the one who had the chance and took it." - Roger Babson
I watched The Big Short recently. Having read the Michael Lewis book, and having lived through the rise and fall of the housing bubble, I can attest that the movie does justice both to the book and to history. And the filmmakers manage to make the discussion of complicated financial instruments understandable in an entertaining way, without dumbing it down.
The main takeaway from the movie is that Wall Street is rigged. The big guys will always get bailed out, and the rest of us will always get stuck footing the bill. Wall Street controls the levers of power in Congress, the Administration, and the Federal Reserve. This should not be a controversial proposition to anyone who has been paying attention the last 6 1/2 years.
But the movie (like the book perhaps, it's been a while since I read it) departs from reality when it depicts its handful of protagonists as the only ones who saw the housing crash coming. Many people saw the housing crash coming. Even I shorted Countrywide (repeatedly) and Impac Mortgage. I got my tip reading the now-defunct I am Facing Foreclosure blog by Casey Serin, an unemployed 24-year-old who had obtained financing from banks to buy at least seven houses. When I saw the promissory note that Countrywide took from this broke deadbeat in lieu of foreclosure, I knew we were on to something. Others learned, or should have learned, about the housing bubble by clues like that in the film when strippers were buying multiple properties all over Florida with little or no money down. Even mainstream publications like The Economist were writing about the housing bubble well before the subprime hit the fan. I went on to have greatfun with the local Countrywide office.
What set The Big Short's big winners apart from others who saw the housing bubble was capital and leverage. The heroes of the film, Dr. Michael Burry and Steve Eisman (Mark Baum / Steve Carell in the movie), were already managing hundreds of millions or more when they made their mortgage bets. The two hedge fund startup kids Jamie and Charlie who the film claimed to have started with $110,000 and turned it into $30 million? Not so much. Jamie is really James Mai, who started Cornwall Capital to manage his father's considerable fortune earned as a pioneer of leveraged buyouts on Wall Street.
In addition to capital, what made the Big Short so big was leverage. Punters like us can short a stock, and make 100% if it goes bankrupt. Or we can buy put options, which might pay off a little richer if we get the timing right. But the big Wall Street guys had access to credit default swaps which gave them leverage to the crash that individual speculators can only dream of. Instruments like these are accessible to those with the "ISDA" agreement that Jamie and Charlie were so desperate to get in the film.
So yes, congratulations to those who were in the right place at the right time, with the right capital and leverage, and made the trade of a lifetime.
The rest of us will have to be content with the psychic rewards of the occasional well-executed Little Short.
The total outstanding education loans held by people 65 and older, including debt that financed their own schooling and their children’s, grew to $18.2 billion in 2013, the most recent year available from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), from $2.8 billion in 2005. That’s twice as fast as the overall growth in student debt. The number of borrowers age 60 and up has increased to 2.2 million, from 700,000 in 2005, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Twenty-seven percent of education loans held by people age 65-74 were in default in 2013, meaning they hadn’t made a payment in 270 days or more. More than half of education loans held by people 75 and older were in default. And the government can garnish wages or suspend tax refunds for anyone who fails to pay their student loans, but it has an extra tool when it comes to senior citizens: taking money out of their Social Security payments. In 2013, 155,000 seniors lost part of their retirement benefit to repay education debt, up from 31,000 in 2002, according to the GAO.
So if fiscal responsibility is out the window, what do Republicans still stand for? The one "win" they claim in the wretched Omnibus is an end to the oil export ban, which is certainly good for Big Oil but doesn't help middle class taxpayers or justify a huge increase to the deficit.
Read the numbers in the CBO analysis here. The numbers beyond 2016 are a complete fiction because they assume Congress won't keep extending the tax breaks and giveaways that they always extend.
I can't pin this all on Paul Ryan. Congressional Republicans as a group are more concerned about serving big business special interests than fixing the spending problem or listening to voters. A majority of Congressional Republicans voted for this bill, and should be voted out of office.
