Morgan Housel: Get Rich, Stay Rich [The Knowledge Project Ep. #195]

Shane Parrish: I want to start with a bit of a paradox. The less money we seem to have, the more risks we’re willing to take. Can you explain that to me?

Morgan Housel: Daniel Kahneman said something along the lines of “When all your options are bad, your willingness to take a risk explodes because you’ve got nothing else to lose.” And I think you see this in a lot of areas in life. I don’t know if it’s the same in Canada, but in America we spend something like a $100 billion a year on lottery tickets—a $100 billion. It’s a massive amount that people spend on lottery tickets. And if you dig into who’s buying them, it’s almost exclusively poor people. They buy the vast majority of lottery tickets, and the poorer you are, the more lottery tickets you buy. And these are some people who literally can’t buy food, or they might be homeless, and whatever little money they have, they go into a 7-Eleven and buy some scratcher tickets.