It really should be, "Playing the lottery is a pretty terrible idea and we're going to, on average, take your money. If you still want to play, fine, but cheeseburgers really are better than lottery tickets. Wealthy people got wealthy by putting their money into index funds and savings accounts."
No they didn't. Not with the implied "as an alternative to lottery tickets".
You could probably find a handful of very well paid and very lottery addicted people constantly blowing up that income. For 99.99[more 9s]% of people, the cost of lottery tickets is not the difference between getting wealthy and not getting wealthy. Even if they buy a bunch every payday.
https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer...
Consider also that the US was populated by people who arrived with nothing. It wasn't wealthy people that came here from Europe.
I looked on the related website and the very first blog entry is about how you can teach your children the skills they identify as leading to wealth.
And yet, it appears that the claim is that, in general, people don't get taught these skills, and some people discover them through sheer grit and determination. Which seems contradictory.
And that's putting aside the weird concept where someone who earns 10 million and spends 9 million on stuff, is ranked as the same as someone who lives a meagre life and dies with 1 million in the bank. I'm not sure that concept translates well into the commonly accepted definition of millionaire.
> people don't get taught these skills
The knowledge is not hard to come by. The book lays it out in simple terms. There's nothing magical about it.
> I'm not sure that concept translates well into the commonly accepted definition of millionaire.
The book is not about a tortured definition of a millionaire or absurd stories about how their wealth was obtained.
It's a quick read and the book is what, a couple bucks? Why not just read it, and then criticize it?
Did they become wealthy, end of story? Saving up money to be wealthy, without the rest of the context, is reasonably common.
If they either needed to specifically curate their lottery habits to become wealthy, or if they failed to become wealthy because of their lottery habits, then I'm interested. Because that's the part that I'm betting is quite rare. And it's also the part that needs to be pretty common if the message is supposed to work as a lottery-relevant message.
Washington State Lottery, "It's good to take your money!"