Powerball drawing: Jackpot hits $1.5 billion

The drug worked, curing her tremors. But eventually something strange happened: Klinestiver, who’d never been a gambler, suddenly became an obsessive slot machine player. She’d spend 18 hours at a time playing the slots, neglecting all other responsibilities. She lost $250,000 and separated from her husband before she was taken off the drug in 2004 — at which point her gambling obsession disappeared within a week.

For the study, Thomas Moore and several other psychiatric researchers analyzed more than 1,000 cases where patients reported impulse control disorders after taking any drug, and found a disproportionate number had taken dopamine agonists. On the whole, users of these drugs were 277 times more likely to report impulse control disorders than users of other medications.

The winning numbers for the record $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot are 08, 27, 34, 04, 19, and Powerball number 10. To win the full $1.5 billion jackpot (or take a lump sum of $930 million), you must have all six numbers correct.

Winning tickets were sold in California, Florida and Tennessee. The jackpot will be split among the winners.

You hear it a lot: The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math.

“I actually laugh a lot of times when I see that,” said Adam Osmond, 48, who owned two Connecticut bodegas that sold lottery tickets. “People who gamble know the numbers.”

But in a segment from 2014, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver made a strong case against state-backed lotteries like the Powerball.

Among Oliver’s more startling findings is that Americans spend more on lotteries than the NFL, video games, music, movie tickets, Major League Baseball, and pornography combined. “Which basically means Americans spent more on the lottery than they spent on America,” he quipped.

Along with Mega Millions, Powerball is as close as the United States comes to a national lottery (tickets are sold in 44 states as well as Washington, DC, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands). And with a new $1.5 billion jackpot looming, it’s worth seeing which states care about the game the most.

Data scientist Seth Kadish mapped Powerball sales as recorded by Lotto Report, while adjusting for population differences and fluctuations from week to week (the data is for sales through March 2015). The week of March 18, 2015, for example, Florida sold a national high of 1,255,643 tickets. But when you adjust ticket sales for every thousand people, the picture of Powerball fanatics looks a lot different:

At 10:59 pm Eastern on Saturday, January 9, there will be a Powerball lottery drawing for an estimated $800 million jackpot.

That’s the biggest jackpot in history, even when adjusted for inflation.

Angus Deaton is many things: a celebrated Princeton economist, an expert on measuring well-being and poverty, and, as of Monday morning, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics. Deaton has an unusually high public profile for an economist — to the point that his research was once cited on Orange is the New Black.

In season three, episode seven, about 36 minutes and 30 seconds in, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) cited a 2010 study by Deaton and Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who also won a Nobel in economics in 2002). This being Piper, she’s less citing it than she is condescendingly richsplaining it to Daya (Dascha Polanco). Appropriately, given her character, Piper takes exactly the wrong lesson from it.

The third ever World Happiness Report — created by the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network and co-edited by economists John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs — is officially out. While the report includes more fascinating data on well-being around the world than I could ever list in full, its centerpiece is a ranking of countries by average happiness. This map summarizes the results:

The report focuses less on momentary emotions (“Are you happy right now?” “Did you have a good day today?“ etc.) than on people’s evaluations of their lives, taken as a whole. It relies on Gallup polling, which asks respondents to imagine the best possible life for them and then rank their current lives on a 0 to 10 scale, relative to that best life. This question is known as “Cantril’s ladder,“ and it’s the standard way many researchers measure life satisfaction (as opposed to momentary happiness).

People living in wealthier countries tend to be more satisfied with their lives than those in poorer countries, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. But the disparity is shrinking as developing and emerging nations see major improvements in their economies and living conditions — and as wealthier countries see their own economies battered by the Great Recession. The Economist charted the trends:

As Pew pointed out, the link between satisfaction and wealth is still very real: “When asked about specific aspects of their lives, publics in nearly all emerging and developing economies are less satisfied with the economic realm, such as their job or standard of living, than with the personal arena, such as family, friends, or religion. Satisfaction with their material well-being, though, has the biggest positive impact on their overall happiness.”