Katherine Hamilton
speaker
654 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Katherine Hamilton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The main idea behind the price increase is they're trying to increase the number of billion-dollar jackpots that they can offer, and that's because the billion-dollar jackpots are really popular.
It was $1 for most of the history of Mega Millions, and then it went up to $2 in 2017, but this is by far the biggest increase.
The idea is that by increasing the ticket price to $5, that sales will increase and the sales goes towards the jackpot.
Basically, it keeps rolling over until a jackpot is paid out.
So they'll be able to have more billion dollar jackpots when the sales are higher.
Yeah, you can see in the sales data how much ticket sales go up when the jackpot hits a billion.
A lot of people say that they wait until it hits $500 million or a billion dollars before they buy a ticket because it feels like a better bet.
But that spike really, it happens when the jackpot hits a billion dollars.
There's definitely a lot of psychological stuff at play because obviously $900 million shouldn't be less of an incentive than a billion, but that's really where you see the ticket sales go up.
And I talked to a bunch of different researchers about this topic, and the consensus kind of is that a million dollars has lost a little bit of its shine over the last couple of decades.
For one thing, obviously a million dollars is worth a lot less than it used to be because of inflation and the cost of living.
But it's also a factor of the time and billionaire is becoming a bigger part of our jargon as a society.
There's more billionaires than there used to be and people are using the word billionaire more than they used to.
Part of that is people can fantasize about being a billionaire because it's more common to hear about billionaires.
That's definitely part of it, too, because trillionaire is also becoming a more frequently used phrase.
We have more companies that are being valued at a trillion dollars for the first time.
And even some billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are getting closer to becoming a trillionaire.
They're about a quarter of the way there right now.
So for the billionaires right now, a trillion dollars is the fantasy.
And so for regular people, I think the psychology is that a billion dollars is the fantasy.
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