Lotto economics

William “Bud” Post, who won a $16.2 million jackpot in Pennsylvania, wound up dying in poverty.

In Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, Arthur C. Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute offers some truths about state lotteries and the U.S. economy.

The truth he doesn’t utter (but should) is one that I speak to anyone who will listen: You can’t win. Statistically speaking, any one individual’s chance of winning a big prize is zero. Someone will win, but it will be someone else.

But he makes the broader point that even if you win, you lose:

(H)itting the jackpot generally leads to unhappiness. A famous 1978 study of major lottery winners in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that while the winners experienced an immediate happiness boost right after winning, it didn’t last. Within a few months, their happiness levels receded to where they had been before winning. As time passed, they found they were actually less happy than they had been before winning.

Mr. Brooks relates this point to the enjoyment of too many Americans of entitlement income. “Above basic subsistence,” he explains, “happiness comes not from money per se, but from the value creation it is rewarding.”

As the statistics he and others have provided demonstrate, the Obama administration and Democratic Congress are quite oblivious to the sinister effects of “free money from the government” on the national psyche.