There is the old saw that says the lottery is a tax on people who don’t understand math.  And, to be honest, that is the absolute truth, albeit a bit harsh.   Sure, people win.  But considering that most of the time it’s a single person and there are millions who play, those are pretty long odds.  Besides, it’s not about how many people play.   You knew that right?  I’ll get to that in a minute. But there has been a recent uptick in the revenues that lotteries across the country are seeing.   It’s really no surprise with the economy in the tank like it is.   People just want a little of that magic to take away the sting of the headlines or that mortgage bill or the feeling that their retirement savings are just not going to cut it in the end. But what about that math? Wait, time out! …

Many years ago, the U.S. government, after the big crash of 2008, was trying to stop the bleeding in the financial system. The number most bandied about was seven hundred billion which everyone knows is a large number. But do we really understand how very large that number is? It seems it starts sounding like 200 billion or 800 billion or 500 billion. All those zeros kind of run together in a person’s mind. A few years back I wrote a piece about having everything and nothing in which I mentioned the odds of winning the lottery. Those odds basically  approached zero which is a really small number. That’s not hard to conceptualize. You have some money, it gets siphoned off by greedy executives running some company, you have zero dollars. Simple. Hey, Bernie Ebbers, prison going ok for you? No? Good! But what about the other end of the…

I am a numbers person. Having studied math in college, I have always found all different manner of numbers, equations and formulas fascinating. From time to time, the US government bandies about big numbers.  There is lots of pearl clutching and gasping but despite that, they still get what they need done and that numbers usually end up with dollar signs bolted on to the front.  So, I got to thinking about how big those numbers are. During all the talk about a decade or more ago about the $700 billion dollar bailout package, I wrote about how big the number one billion is, what a billion dollars could buy and a few ways you could use to visualize such a number. It was The Stimulus Package; the $780 billion that was meant to pull our collective a$$es out of the fire in which we found ourselves since the complete…