Is $800 a year a lot? Invested for 30 years with a 8% return it will be $100k or maybe $300/month in safe withdrawals. Im not trying to beg a question here... Really is that a lot of money? $300 isn't enough to live on but it's maybe a quarter of the poverty line? I guess that would be significant when added to social security.

Is that per capital lottery spend just total sales divided by population? The more interesting statistic would be average spend by people who buy at least a ticket a month. I'm sure the $761/month is brought down by people who buy 0-5 tickets a year.

Off-topic, but there's a meme on HN that startup equity should be considered "a lottery ticket" (as though you couldn't actively make it into a winner.) As a cute exercise (not too serious) based on your comment, I divided California's $23.8 billion in startup investment in 2017[1] by its population in 2017[2], which is 39.54 million, and got... $601.

(Of course the entities buying these tickets are not necessarily "Californians", just thought this was an interesting take on "per-Capita" investment in a different sort of lottery ticket. It is also funding amounts, rather than opportunity costs people "invest" in these companies by working for reduced or no salary in exchanged for equity - which is the "cost" of the lottery ticket people usually talk about on HN. I just found the resulting number in this exercise really interesting and thought I'd share.)

[1] https://tech.co/10-best-states-startup-funding-ranked-2017-0...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=california+population+2017&o...

Even more crazy when you consider how many people never play the lotto.

However, I think that's the gross spend. If a lotto system has a lot of little prizes it could inflate those numbers quickly. You might not win the $1.6B, but if your tickets win $1 or $2 on a regular basis then your net outlay could be quite a bit less.

Effectively each ticket might only cost $0.25 instead of $1 because you get $0.75 back on average. On this chart it would look like you spent the full $1 each time because it doesn't include winnings.

And for me : about $2 per year