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Comment by psanford | Hacker News Reader

> Most people who make a lot of money all at once blow it within seven years

This is a commonly recited myth about lottery winners[1].

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnjennings/2023/08/29/debunki...

There's a legendary Reddit comment that lays out the many, many other ways winning the lottery (or, more importantly, letting people know you won the lottery) is bad for you. Can you debunk its claims as well?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/c...

That comment makes untrue claims and cites no sources. The claim about multi-million dollar jackpot winners is a viral meme that keeps making the rounds despite the people with the actual stats repeatedly trying to debunk it. It is not true that a huge percentage of winners go bankrupt.

https://www.nefe.org/news/2018/01/research-statistic-on-fina...

https://www.reddit.com/r/PetPeeves/comments/18xqcbw/70_of_lo...

I imagine that it's perpetuated by the myth that people who make a shitton of money "legitimately" (ie getting insanely lucky by inheritance, investing in a moonshot, or both) are somehow magically blessed with the wisdom to handle money in a way that commoners are not. Plus a dash of cope for all the people who will never touch that amount of money. Assurance that even those who gain a lot will be no better off (or worse off) than them.

I also think the myth of “winners lose everything eventually” is a specific instance of general hate against gambling…

AKA “the house always wins” philosophy

The Reddit comment is interesting, and I think the advice that starts in the reply is sound. But this person's list of lottery winner failures is a small list of people versus a very large group of winners. Surely it's not hard to cherry pick a bunch of worst case scenarios.

i am still willing to experiment, for science

Unfortunately, you got put in the control group.

The reddit comment says things like "Homicide (something like 20x more likely)" without citing the source of this statistics.

Haha I read the article - not surprisingly they pick lottery winners in countries that provide anonymity to winners (unlike the US where you will have a target painted on your back).

> 2019 by researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Zurich, used a considerable dataset — fifteen years of the “German Socio-Economic Panel” (or SOEP). The SOEP has been surveying 15,000 German households since 1984.

> The second study, from 2020 by researchers from Stockholm University, Stockholm School of Economics, and New York University, surveyed 3,000 Swedish lottery winners

See this comprehensive list:

https://old.reddit.com/r/LotteryLaws/comments/v78hhy/anonymi...

>EuroJackpot Countries (Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands*, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden): 100% Anonymous if requested by the winner.

Compare it to:

>California: Not Anonymous/Only individuals can claim. “ The name and location of the retailer who sold you the winning ticket, the date you won and the amount of your winnings are also matters of public record and are subject to disclosure. You can form a trust prior to claiming your prize, but our regulations do not allow a trust to claim a prize. Understand that your name is still public and reportable”.

I am a little bit suspicious of Forbes saying "in fact, money does buy happiness". I fear they might have a little bias.

I expected something like a Snopes link. Ah well.

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