Is there a typical lottery winner?

There is definitely a blueprint that lottery winners tend to follow. Look no further than the people who play the lottery to figure out who wins the lottery. If you take out the big Powerball jackpots that get so much national media attention that everybody and their dog play—the doctors, the lawyers, the brain surgeons, everybody—when we talk about your everyday, average players, they tend to be relatively blue-collar folks. They come from a lower- to lower-middle-class background and the lower end of the education spectrum.

(Photograph by Vincent Ricardel.)

You can imagine that, coming from this background, there’s a big chance for problems when they come into that kind of money. One of the reasons many lottery winners are so troubled is that they are grossly unprepared to make the type of decisions surrounding this instant wealth. Someone who earned it or inherited it would have people surrounding him who could help him—a lottery winner would have no clue what to do, short of opening up the Yellow Pages and looking under "money."

But are there lottery winners who take the money and live happily ever after?

Yes. There absolutely are. Unfortunately, they are more of a rarity than anyone would wish. If you wonder why there are so few of them, the answer is advisors. They get a good financial team and listen to that team right away. That may seem logical, but when your entire background—financial, cultural—is catch-as-catch-can, hustling your entire life to get by, working hard, but never enjoying the luxuries of life, you make different choices. If you look at the way the lottery presents winning, it’s, "Hey, you’re a millionaire, and now it’s easy street for you." Lottery winners believe that hype; they listen to their friends and family rather than to solid financial advisors who will put them on a budget—not just saying yes to everything.

And the lottery bureaucracy does nothing to help winners manage their winnings.

I do not believe that lotteries have negative motivations. However, they run like businesses, and they answer to a bottom line. They need to keep revenue coming in, which means they get a lot of marketing juice out of winners by displaying them to the population. I strongly believe that if lotteries were more protective of winners’ privacy and made some kind of institutional and financial assistance available to them—rather than just wheeling them in front of the press with an oversize check—there would be significantly fewer instances of winners getting into the kinds of trouble that feed the tabloids. It starts with the lotteries themselves: They don’t protect their winners once they win.

You describe the impact that sudden, unearned wealth has on human beings. Is there a psychological common ground that we all share in the face of windfalls?

The biggest problem that people who have a sudden windfall face—and it becomes especially acute among lottery winners—is that they have a bull’s-eye on their backs. Many people take aim at those with money, and many of those people are their closest friends and their most trusted family. It is very easy to circle the wagons and say, "Don’t let outsiders in," but when you have people in your intimate circle eyeing your bank account, that’s when things really get tough. So many lottery winners learn that hard lesson a little too late and soon there is nothing left. It is a depressing truth when they learn that everyone—even their mothers and fathers, siblings and best friends—wants a free ride. Winners usually respond in one of two ways: They say, "To hell with it," and share it all until it’s gone. Or they seal up and trust no one. Either way, it is not the "sitting on a yacht drinking martinis" life that the lottery advertising campaigns portray.

Don’t people who earn large sums of money experience the same thing? For example, does Bill Gates’ distant cousin show up at Thanksgiving dinner with his hand out?

I can tell you that when someone has earned his own money, it is much more likely that, along the way, he would have surrounded himself with financial caretakers who provide the good, solid advice that will keep him out of harm’s way. That’s why you see so many fewer examples of the kind of pain that instant wealth brings. These are people who have earned it or even people who have inherited it. I would say that with people who have inherited large sums of money there is a level of sophistication with money that comes with having had money over time, and also a level of expectation from the family with regard to what will happen with the money.