I written often about the problem of large gifts of money, such as the lottery. My first published comments on this subject are in The Seven Laws of Money published first in 1974 with sales and readership ultimately reaching in the hundreds of thousands. It still sells.
What provokes this blog is that the NYTimes finally has an article on the subject. It makes a trivial comparison between MacArthur Fellow grants and published Lottery winner material.
What I want to comment on is my increased pro commerce understanding of the issue. In terms of the Seven Laws of Money, laws five and six say you can’t give money away or receive money without recognizing the implicit expectations that go with the money.
The implicit expectation of the MacArthur Fellow grants is that you will do more of the good work you are doing. The implicit expectation of the lottery is that you will become a constructive member of society.
Most MacArthur Fellows find it easy to meet this expectation. They are selected for their previous commitments and public behavior. Continuing the behavior is no problem. Their lives are already committed in nearly all circumstance.
Lottery winners are just randomly selected people, 96% (that is a guess) who have no meaning or direction in their lives. No amount of money can give their lives direction nor can it help them understand how to make their lives constructive in the world. So they squander it all in most cases. A few have churches or causes to give their money to and they do. The rest face misery.
This never took insight on my part. One’s life is either meaningful or it isn’t. I never found a way to help people find meaning.
My pro commerce understanding that adds to this is that commerce creates the possibility of having a meaningful life with its infinite options for livelihood. The MacArthur type of award only makes sense in a pro commerce world.