Complex Numbers

The Curse

https://www.thedailybeast.com/he-won-dollar19-million-in-the-lotteryand-became-a...

Jim Hayes won the jackpot of a lifetime and spent big on Lamborghinis and Vegas gambling trips. Then his life went south and he turned to crime.

“Having money enabled me to live my wildest dreams,” he said. “But there’s a flip side. It’s the lottery curse.”

Okay, I'm just going to come out and say it: There is no fucking "lottery curse."

The Venn diagram of "people who play the lottery" and "people who make bad financial decisions" has significant overlap. That's all. It's been said that the lottery is a tax on people who can't do math. Well, that's not the whole story - it's not a question of being bad at math, exactly, but being bad with money in general. Yeah, from a return-on-spending point of view, it's a fool's game, but at some point, someone does win big. It's not a retirement plan, but it's also not exactly like burning the cash you'd spend on lottery tickets in a firepit.

Now, I'm not saying that lotteries are evil (or good) or that people who play the lottery are stupid (or smart). Those are not the issues, either. Again, it's about making good financial decisions, and that doesn't take intelligence so much as knowledge and the discipline to apply that knowlege. The guy in this article strikes me as being of somewhat normal intelligence, definitely not a moron, but not about to crack the Unified Field Theory either.

“Common sense tells you that if you win millions, your life is made—but it doesn’t always end up like that.”

No, common sense tells me that if you win millions, you need to not blow it all.

“Right before he won, he was dealing with depression and some pretty severe problems,” said Stephen Demik, a criminal defense attorney who represented Hayes on the robbery case. “But when you win $19 million, your first stop isn’t going to be a psychologist— it’s going to be a new car lot.”

And we start to see the problem right here. Not even his words - his attorney's. No, if I won the lottery (unlikely, as I don't buy tickets), my first stop wouldn't be a psychologist OR a new car lot, but a lawyer. A financial lawyer, not a defense attorney.

Just going by the article, though, I'd say it was a combination of bad rolls of the dice, and him having no financial discipline. Not a curse, unless "being unable to deal with what life throws at you" is a curse.

I've seen a bunch of articles like this lately, and they all seemed geared toward convincing us all that if you win the lottery, your life is going to be in ruins. Well, yeah, it could be. Or it could not be. You don't hear about the people who win a lottery and spend wisely, because they don't end up living in garages and robbing banks; they're on a beach somewhere in Belize or quietly going on with their lives without worrying too much about how they're going to afford their next month's groceries. They do exist. There's selection bias there on the part of reporters, and it's pernicious.

So to sum up: go into the lottery with lousy financial acumen, and you're boned. Go into it with some amount of sensibility about money, and you'll probably do okay.

Not that you're going to win it, anyway. But someone will.