re: #148 freetoken

The stories of lotto winners who are miserable are “just so” logical fallacies. They tend to be promoted by people who claim to have earned their wealth by their industry or intelligence, and winning a large chunck of money in a lotto is somehow unfair to that idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

So out come the financial wizards with anecdotal stories of people who were “unhappy”: divorce over new-found wealth, people who blew all their money (because money=happiness), &c.

There are even a couple cases where people were murdered over lotto tickets (ignoring people get murdered for money all the time, and a winning lotto ticket is effectively money).

It would probably be difficult to fashion a scientific study of “those who are happy versus unhappy.” The best you could do is a survey with subjective values for “happy,” and those could still be cherry-picked for the “just so” unhappy stories.