NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - When it comes to purchasing lottery tickets, making people feel poor will prompt them to spend more money on a chance to become rich, American researchers said. They found that people who were convinced they were earning a low salary bought nearly twice as many lottery tickets compared to others who were made to feel more affluent. "When people are made to feel subjectively poor, they end up buying more lottery tickets which is somewhat perverse since every time you buy a lottery ticket, it's the equivalent of burning money," said George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who advised the research team. "It's certainly paradoxical that making people feel poor means they are more likely to burn money," he added in an interview. A recent report by the Commission on Thrift, a project of the private, non-profit think tank Institute for American Values, said that U.S. households with incomes under $12,400 spend an average of $645 on lotteries.

First of all I'm calling bullshit on that last statistic. People who make under $12,400 a year spend about $6,000 on lottery tickets. That $645 number has to be a typo. And #2, why do they even have studies like this? I didn't need Carnegie Mellon to tell me poor people play the lottery more than rich people. I mean how many times are you going to see Bill Gates in line at the Colorado "Loaf n' Jug"? Not many. Here's an idea - how about a study on how dudes have gone 15 years without winning at Keno? There's something to research. I don't know, I guess it is kind of ironic that in a study about wasting money, these people just wasted a shitload.