It is most certainly a tax on the poor and undereducated. The level of cognitive dissonance required to believe that there is not a massive information asymmetry at hand is simply staggering. Yes, some people are perfectly able to calculate the probability of winning the lottery and know that they should gain enjoyment just from playing, not from the belief that they'll win. These are not the people who are victims. The victims are the high school dropouts who don't understand that their chances of getting hit by lightning while simultaneously getting hit by a bus while crossing the street are still better than winning the lottery. Many, if not most, of these people don't really have the discretionary spending ability to lose hundreds of dollars a month on merely dreaming of winning the lottery. But somehow we pretend everything's fine.
There certainly are people like you describe but I'd say most do understand that their chances are minuscule -- even if they really don't understand the numbers. But they don't care; they're desperate and don't exactly have many options so they grasp for the only thing they know that might change their condition.
> their chances of getting hit by lightning while simultaneously getting hit by a bus while crossing the street are still better than winning the lottery
While I agree with you in philosophy, I wonder if that is the best example. I don't think I've ever seen a news report of someone getting hit by lightning and a bus at the same time, but people do seem to win the lottery on a fairly regular basis. This suggests that winning the lottery may be the more likely of the two.
Someone winning the lottery is more likely than someone getting hit by a bus while being struck by lightening. You specifically winning the lottery is probably less likely than you specifically getting hit by a bus at the same time as being struck by lightening.
A quick survey of the literature seems to indicate that gambling activity (including lottery play) is positively correlated with income.
If it was a tax on the poor and undereducated, the correlation should be negative, yet the first three articles I found on the matter said it's positive, and that income is the strongest determinant of gambling activity.
It's more complicated than that. First of all you have to separate the different gambling activities. Some activities, like card games at a casino, are more positively correlated to income and education, while most studies on activities like the lottery and scratch tickets show negative correlation to both income and education.
Secondly simply looking at the number of times person partakes in an activity or just how much they spend only gives a small and incomplete picture. The really important number is what proportion of their total income is spent on gambling. Most studies seem to find that the poor spend a higher proportion of their income on lottery tickets than richer people.
