4 ms·

You're possibly right, but do people who inherit millions or win the lottery strike you as particularly happy after 10 years? Admittedly, I only have anecdotal

• danaris 5y ago
  That's not generally a good measure, because a) the people who play the lottery tend to be poorer, and b) poorer people tend to have poorer financial literacy/education. This means that they don't know what to do with that massive windfall, they manage it poorly or are taken advantage of, and end up unhappy. And the ones who do know what to do with it tend to do very boring things (set up iron-clad structured annuities or something, I imagine—I don't claim to have enough financial education to do it well myself!), and we don't hear about them because "guy won $500m 20 years ago, is living a comfortable but unremarkable life now" doesn't sell papers. Note that this is also very different from how a UBI would affect people, because that would be moderate amounts of money regularly for life (y'know...rather like an iron-clad structured annuity); there's no way to "blow it" and end up with nothing. People who inherit very large sums of money, but are not themselves born into wealth, are so rare as to be essentially a myth. There certainly aren't enough of them to make a reasonably rigorous sample size for a scientific study.
• Can_Not 5y ago
  The ones that were able to keep their anonymity and didn't engage in fiscally irresponsible behavior like drug purchases and $200k+ vehicles are probably very happy after 10 years.