Does winning the lottery wreck your life? When an anonymous Briton won £177m in the EuroMillions draw last month – making them the third biggest national lottery winner ever – the Mail Online announced it with all the impartiality of a bad fairy at a christening: “Other big winners”, the second half of the headline ran, “have faced ‘lottery curse’ with divorce, disease, family splits and death”.
Follow the progress of lottery winners through the newspapers, and you’d be forgiven for thinking they all live out the same morality tale. Headlines such as “The bad luck of winning” and “A treasury of terribly sad stories of Lotto winners” drive home the point.
Someone with an ordinary job wins millions, but the gift is poisoned and their life soon changes dramatically for the worse. They fall out with their family and friends and ditch their spouse for someone else, who turns out only to want them for their money. They leave their job and spend all day blowing the cash. Soon they are bankrupt, friendless and addled with addiction problems, sobbing that winning the lottery was the worst thing ever to happen to them.
One of the most repeated stories is that of “Lotto lout” Michael Carroll, who won £9.7m in 2002 and spent the whole thing on drugs, gambling and brothels, claiming he started each day with “three lines of Charlie and half a bottle of vodka”. He wound up homeless, bankrupt, divorced, and a “full-blown alcoholic”, returning to his former life as a refuse collector.
Another is the story of Mukhtar Mohidin, Britain’s first national lottery multimillionaire. After winning £17.9m, he rapidly transformed from a hard-working family man to a violent playboy gambler. His marriage fell apart, he was shunned by the community, and his relatives fell out with each other over the money.
British teenager Callie Rogers won £1.8m in 2003, and spent hundreds of thousands on her friends and family. She later told a tabloid she had become anxious that people were only after her for her money. Eventually, the money spent, she took up work as a cleaner, moving back in with her mother. “Now the money has all gone I can find some happiness,” she said. “It’s ruined my life.” But are these stories outliers, or the rule? There’s a long circulated statistic – often credited to the National Endowment for Financial Education in America – that 70% of lottery winners end up bankrupt within a couple of years. But it’s baseless. The NEFE has issued a statement distancing itself from the claim and saying the statistic was not backed by any evidence it could find. Meanwhile, a large-scale study in Florida found that filing for bankruptcy was relatively rare among lottery winners – and it made no difference whether they won less than $10,000 or more than $50,0000.
Will the lottery leave you lonely, family and friends grubbing over the spoils? Not according to a study by Joan Costa-Font from the London School of Economics, which finds that winning the lottery may actually strengthen your close relationships. Winners spent more time with their friends, although less time talking to neighbours. Why? The more money you have, the less you need to socialise for practical reasons – you can do it just for fun.
But does the lottery make you happier? Well, yes. A large sample of Swedish lottery players found that winners of large prizes experienced “sustained increases in overall life satisfaction” that persisted for over a decade, and showed no sign of dissipating. Most spent their winnings slowly over many years, and most kept working, although their leisure time was of higher quality. A German study found that the more you won, the happier you were. There’s some evidence, too, that a lottery win might also make you healthier in the long run.
Yet the interest in unfortunate winners persists. The online magazine Slate has reported on a long history of lottery-related newspaper headlines in the United States: “A baker and his pregnant wife murdered for his winnings by an employee (Paris, France, 1765). A squandered jackpot invested in a failed shipping venture (Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1883). A winner dying of a heart attack immediately upon hearing news of his windfall (Bilbao, Spain, 1934).”
Is this a consequence of accumulated cherrypicking in the papers? Report on enough “unusual outliers” and they can start to look like the norm. That’s one explanation. But there are larger myths at work: the platitude that money doesn’t buy happiness; the snobbish idea that people on low incomes don’t know how to handle large amounts of cash.
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The first is soothing thought translated into popular wisdom: it’s psychologically useful for the non-rich to think they’d be worse off with more money. But it is also rather helpful cover for the rich; it shields them from too much envy. Reinforced by rich and poor, no wonder it has become so embedded in popular culture – the wealthy-but-unhappy is a trope that repeats and repeats.
But is it true? A 2010 study that theorised a “happiness plateau” after a certain income became wildly popular. Less commonly known is the fact that the study was debunked – it turns out to be true only for those who are already very unhappy (there are some problems money can’t mend). For most, though, happiness increases with income.
And the second myth is even more corrosive. What starts with contempt for low-income lottery winners ends in the idea that charities should not give money to those in need, because they will waste it. But that’s not true. Getting some cash is in fact a rather reliable way to improve your life. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
