Who wants to be a millionaire?

As the discussion on creative capitalism shows, upping the windfall by a factor of 1000 doesn’t resolve the dilemma either.

But rather than trying to run a company for profit, how about using money to promote the kinds of things that for-profit companies don’t do well (at least in the early stages) like blogs and wikis (and before that the Internet itself), but which have a lot of social value and ultimately create the conditions for continued productivity growth . I bet there are some big gaps that could be filled with a million well-spent euros. Suggestions?

I’d pay off the mortgage, stop trying to “keep my hand” doing part time work, and find good causes to volunteer for.

… and just checked: quite apart from value of property/etc., Yaddo has a $32M endowment and spends $1.2M a year on operating costs.

So, the Powerball would have to be very, very big that week.

I’m with Calvin. Apart from a few extra indulgences, and assuming it’s a ginormous lottery win, I’d like to use it to afflict wrongdoers with vexatious but meritorious legal cases, fund political campaigns etc. All as anonymously as possible of course. It’s a sad sort of superhero megalomaniac fantasy isn’t it.
Incidentally I was shocked by the US lottery system, it seemed to embody the sort of institutionalised dishonesty that is rife there. If a lottery is advertised as $50million, you should get that, immediately, (as you do in Australia), not some reduced lump sum amount or a 30 year trickle.

I thought about this the other day, walking past an advert for the Euro millions roll over. I’d live part time in the West Indies and run a cricket academy to find the new Curtly Ambrose or Malcolm Marshall. I’d also fund young junior squash players struggling to pay their way on the world tour. This and a few other little projects would, I think, make me very happy.

my husband and I (both junior academics) recently inherited almost exactly the sum you suggest, and it feels like winning the lottery. Aside from paying off the mortgage, we haven’t made any major changes – not even any extra holidays. Extra money doesn’t seem to buy any extra hours in the day or to solve the problem of juggling both the kids I love and the job I love.

One thing I do notice now is a sense of disconnection – I read about the credit crunch and don’t care much, because we don’t have to worry about what we spend any more. Its like a great big safety net that insulates you from part of the world.

The only sensible thing to do with such a windfall (€3.2m) would be to take the next helicopter to the Galway Races.

I would spend the money on a concerted attempt to destroy Tom Friedman’s career and reputation. Everyone seems to agree that this needs to be done, but nobody has the time or funds to actually do it. I figure that national newspaper opinion columnists can probably be bribed for roughly $50k a column (sounds about right?), so with a $3m lottery win, I could have a column a week placed writing about how bad Friedman’s journalism is for a year, with $400k left over to persuade the Economist to jump on the bandwagon.

@16: seems like a beautiful dream to me, since all we’re doing is dreaming.

On which note, @14, your dream is to sit around and be ordinary? How sweet. You could at least throw in a little bit of ‘country cottage, roses round the door’ to tart it up. I thought you mean that with that kind of money, you’d be running the local rackets in six months…. [Or perhaps you *do* mean that? Is all that talk of donating to charity a coded hint?]

I’ve found myself agreeing with the idea that it’s somehow wrong to simply live off a lump sum, that there is some obligation (capitalist? moral? here, they seem to be one and the same.) to put that money to work. (…) it’s more virtuous to buy a company and run it, creating jobs, driving growth, and being an all round contributor to the market economy.

I always found that this was a rather strange way of thinking. Apart from the already discussed fact, that you would need a lot more money to pull that off, it’s not like your going to put your money under your pillow, but instead you’ll keep it in a bank, which in turn will use it to do just that: fuel the market economy. Unless you have something very specific in mind and have the competency that will ensure a reasonable chance of pulling it off (but in that case you could start your own company tomorrow with just a convincing business plan and no money of your own), it’s probably better to leave it to professionals. So I think even if we regarded contributing to the economy as a moral imperative, it’s just fine to live off a lump sum.

And now that I live in America… I’m warming up to the idea that it’s more virtuous to buy a company and run it, creating jobs, driving growth, and being an all round contributor to the market economy.

You’ve been co-opted, then: it may already be too late to save you. Also, you’d do capitalism, but better? Helping those in a position to help themselves? I think that’s covered, more or less.

I’d fund and manage research projects that I can see would be great, but which nobody is doing, because they’re awkward or because it’s hard to get a strong community of interest around them without an initial product. The sort of thing I might otherwise spend my entire career raising money for. Also, I’d travel a lot and get a private spa that could finally deal with my chronic back pain. I reckon 40 or 50 million should do it.

I think there would be some value in funding a peer-reviewed scientific journal that only published results where the null hypothesis was confirmed. The only problem is that, after a childhood spent reading Asimov, I suspect merely confirming knowledge rather than expanding its boundaries would get boring fast, so the idea has limited value for day-dreaming.

If any Timberites should find themselves in this situation, and feel the moral pressure too great and the ethical calculus too complex to resolve, I hereby selflessly offer to take the responsibility off their hands. Along with the cash.

The ‘winning the lotto’ fantasy is a lot of escapist fantasy to it, the desire to leave behind a drudgery or mind-numbing lifestyle. From what I’ve seen and heard with the Florida Lotto and how the winners end up in more dire straits when all their winnings burn up – due to friends and family members and con artists showing up on the doorstep with their hands out – so it turns out the fantasy still require some thought to make it actually work out well.

If I did ever win the Lotto (by the by, I only start playing after it hits the $10 million mark), my fantasy plays out as: pay off debts, pay off mortgage, set up trust funds for my nephews and niece’s colleges, move into a nicer home, and set up a trust fund for myself to prevent me from over-indulging, live off a stipend of sorts. Starting a small local business sounds about right: keep myself busy but at least at something I’d like to do.

I think you’ve hit on why it’s a rather cliche’d guidance counselor question.

If you can’t have a Gulfstream to hell with it.
A friend of mine’s son-in-law has one on order with delivery in a couple of years. Yes, there is a waiting list.
We are going skiing at his place in Sun Valley this winter. We will get a peek at how the really rich live. Glad they share.
On the lottery thing: Horse property in Woodside California and enough money in reserve to cover taxes, maintenance, gardeners, house maids, stable hands and some really good wine.

I’ve got almost exactly the amount of money Maria’s talking about, and enough of it is invested in bonds to provide me with a decent professional salary, about $100k/yr. I live with my superannuated mother, who gets Social Security (about $1k/mo) and a comparable annuity, who also owns a very nice house with a big yard on top of a tall hill overlooking the Pacific.

What it means in practice is that, after filling the bird feeders and making coffee and bringing in the papers, recycling their plastic wrappings and separating the advertising sections, I harry and cajole her, every day, to get dressed so that we can drive downtown in my fine, 9yo sports car, whipping expertly down the hairpin turn. She has a small mocha and I have a double expresso and a cigarette. We walk along the boardwalk. She exclaims over the toddlers, the homeless, the pigeons and the seagulls and I ogle the bikinis. We sit for a little while, then we get some lunch: she gets chicken quesadillas, bacon-wrapped scallops, tuna sandwiches, chicken curry, whatever she wants. I indulge my taste for pork and lamb to the extent I can.

Then we go home, she fills the hummingbird feeders, loads the dishwasher, watches PBS and baseball or basketball until I drag myself away from my blog addiction and then together we’ll watch whatever the Tivo has captured, or we’ll listen to a CD. Meanwhile we’ll drink a lot. She gets lemon vodka, I get red wine.

This isn’t the life I chose, just the one I wound up with. My first choice would probably be not to share what short time I have left with an elderly woman. On the other hand, few other dates would nearly be as enthusiastic about chamber music.

Katherine:
One difference might be whatever nurture/gene configurations got them those uber-rich trust funds in the first place.
Calling them “bunnies” is maybe unfair? It’s one of those culturally-sanctioned light bigotries like “trailer trash” or hillbilly”.
Kids who get warped and stunted by too much material comfort are just as innocent as kids who get warped by too little. Less immediately sympathetic, just like a morbidly obese person is less heart-rending than a starved-skinny one, though both can be desperately miserable, and both conditions traced to economic imbalance and cultural inequality.

Playing the game of capital accumulation as it’s laid out requires a ruthlessness and a sense of natural entitlement that goes way past wishful thinking or daydream, where most of us spend our millions.
People get rich by zeroing in on making money and keeping it.

Changes take place all along that path, but most successful accumulators of wealth are like successful athletes, total focus on the goal to the exclusion of all else. Their descendants are another story. Though privilege generally, when it isn’t inculcating guilt makes the privileged feel deserving, and provides them ready proof.
Whereas the rest of us may truly feel deserving, but have to accommodate the lack of material evidence for it.

The reasons for not having money are obviously way more scattered and indistinct than the reasons for having it. So out here in havenotville you’re going to see wider responses to wealth and how to disburse it than in the dens and lofts of big money.

What people actually do with lottery winnings…well the idea behind the lottery is anyone can win, if they play. So the bulk of those stats are from a group prone to playing, with commonality of a partial grasp of economic and mathematical realities and whatever’s made them hungry enough to play.

Whereas here the group is prone to cerebral exercise and status determined by intellectual and academic success. The overlap’s pretty small I reckon.

Still guessing but I’d wager the bulk of this readership would skew more generous than the average lottery winner or fortunate heir.

I find it kind of cute that Maria seems to be under the impression that 3.2M is sufficient for much more than just providing a decent income. And the aversion to the annuity form of lottery payouts is also surprising. It’s an attempt to solve the problem others have brought up. Basically, at least half the people out there have no idea what to do with money, and they’re also the people who frequently win the lottery. And yeah, it doesn’t usually do them much good.

I think 3.2M Euro is really just the breaking point where I might think about doing more than just putting it into an investment account and slightly upgrading my lifestyle.

I actually really like my job since I don’t have too work too much. But there are a lot of other things I would also like to do that are incompatible with working full time.

Okay aaron_m. Thank you for playing. You win the smart alec award on this thread. The problem is that you’re posts are inconsistent. On the one hand, you point out that with the income from 3.2M you could support a modest upper-middle income lifestyle. And you also write that you wouldn’t change much in your own life. But you also make fun of those who maintain that 3.2M is not enough to ‘do’ anything with. Well, here’s the point. There are plenty of things we could do with our lives that could be slightly impressive. 3.2M would give us the freedom to do it without incurring financial hardship, but we’re not talking about putting the money to use as an investment in any of these schemes. It’s not enough money to have any real impact in a business sense, and I think that’s what people are pointing out and that you seem to be missing. That’s what people mean when they say 3.2M is not enough to do anything with.

If you thought 3.2M was enough to make a real difference, let me point out that you could easily make this kind of money in the right profession. So if you really thought there was important charity work to be done on this basis, the right thing to do would be to go work in finance, busting your butt for 15 years, and then retire and go on to do great work with your 3.2. But it doesn’t work that way. 3.2 is enough to live, but not enough to make a big difference. Might as well just do a job you believe in and not sacrifice the 15 years.

Aaron_m, you’re right that I should have used a different word. I apologize for choosing a word that created that connotation. But I still think it’s a little silly to talk about how you are suddenly going to have aspirations to really make a difference in the world now that you have 3.2M. And silly would have been a better word to use; perhaps more negative, but less condescending. Yes, you can start a business for less, but the business isn’t going to succeed because of the presence or lack of startup capital. It’s going to succeed because of the work you put into. Now if you went out tomorrow looking for 3.2M in capital, you probably wouldn’t be able to find it. But if 3.2M was all you actually needed to make your idea work, after spending time developing the right kind of reputation I think most people could eventually get that kind of funding (if they’re competent enough that they really could do something with it). But then we’re at the same place that we started; would 3.2M change anything for you? If it would, you should try to go about raising it, not day dream about winning the lottery. My point is that the sum needs to be much larger before we’re talking about the kind of money where direct investment is really going to have an impact that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to achieve in your life.

But ultimately, I’m not sure we’d disagree on these specific points. I think your primary purpose here is just to make fun of people who you think imply, through their comments, that a middle income lifestyle would not qualify as sufficient freedom for them to abandon paying work they don’t find otherwise rewarding. In which case you should just say so and not be so snide about it.

Okay, I think there was some pessimism and downplaying of the quality of life improvements that 3.2M would buy, I’ll agree. But I think when people emphasized that 3.2M is not a significant sum of money in the context of running a small business or charity, they are pretty much right on the money. So whereas Dan Simon’s comments in 6 are unduly negative Turnipseed’s comments in 4 and 28, with regards to the cost of business operations, are perfectly appropriate. The whole point is that there is not nearly as much qualitative difference between 500K and 3.2M as the original post surmises.

That seems like a fair point. If you have enough in the bank, you might be willing to risk a decent number of working years as an entrepreneur of sorts pursuing projects that may never yield any personal income for you. I can buy that. That’s a little different than what the original post was suggesting, and it wasn’t very obvious in your original comments, but it’s a good point. But I’m not sure anyone else is paying attention at this point, unfortunately. ;)

It’s enough to buy 3.2 million lottery tickets. Double or nothin’, baby!

Wow, this is a fascinating comment thread. Really a lot here.

A few million isn’t the kind of money where you can hire a ton of people to do stuff for you, but it will give you enough to really see what you yourself can do with total financial security to take risks and enough to hire the advice or buy the tools you need. So it’s an interesting challenge.

I don’t really know what I would do. There are a few crazy/risky nonprofit ideas I have that I might take a shot at if I had more money, but I might decide they were still impractical. I vaguely dream about career changes, but I suspect I’d decide that was a grass is greener thing. I might just make a happier version of me — my current general type of work, but arrange to telecommute from my favorite place to live, etc.

I know quite a number of academics who wouldn’t change a thing if they won the lottery. Really successful, driven academics are pretty happy with themselves and their lives.