【英语生活】我想用裁员费买彩票

Thanks to the recession kindly engineered by financial whiz-kids, I find myself jobless with large debts and a house that is worth less than the mortgage. I have some redundancy money. What am I supposed to do with it? It's not enough to pay off my debts. Financial disaster seems very likely, so why shouldn't I just spend the windfall on lottery tickets?
J.P., via e-mail

Dear J.P.,

I'm not going to argue with you about the expected returns on lottery tickets; you'll know that your chances of winning anything worthwhile are near zero. Let me make a more striking claim: even if you won, it would be unlikely to save you from financial trouble.

The economists Scott Hankins, Mark Hoekstra and Paige Marta Skiba are in the process of investigating that claim, looking at 35,000 winners of the Florida lottery, almost 2,000 of whom later filed for bankruptcy. The researchers find that lottery winners are more likely to go bankrupt than others – which is not surprising, since many of them don't win much, and lottery enthusiasts tend to be poor.

More surprising is the discovery that those who won between $50,000 and $150,000 were as likely to have gone bankrupt five years later as those who won less than $10,000. Since the size of a win is random, there should have been no difference between big winners and small winners at the time they bought their ticket. It is remarkable that the additional money was not used to pay off debts.

Admittedly, winning $100,000 did seem to postpone bankruptcy by a year or two, so presumably these winners had a nice time on their way to ruin. Yet this is not an approach I feel able to recommend. Finding a job would go a long way to solving your problems. I won't pretend that will be easy, but the odds are better than those of winning the lottery.

感谢金融神童们好意策划的这场经济衰退，我丢掉了工作，负债累累，手里这套房子的价值还不及抵押贷款。我手头有些裁员补偿金，该怎么用呢？这笔钱不够还清我的债务，看来很有可能发生财务灾难。那我何不干脆用这笔意外收入买彩票呢？

J.P. （电子邮件）

亲爱的J.P.，

我不打算与你探讨彩票的预期收益问题；你应该知道，中任何像样大奖的几率接近于零。请让我提出一个更惊人的观点：就算你中奖了，你也不太可能摆脱财务问题。

经济学家斯科特•汉金斯(Scott Hankins)、马克•霍克斯特拉(Mark Hoekstra)和佩奇•玛尔塔•斯吉芭(Paige Marta Skiba)正在研究这种观点，他们调查了佛罗里达州的3.5万名彩票得主，其中约2000人后来申请了破产。研究人员发现，彩票得主破产的可能性比其他人更大——这不足为奇，因为他们中很多人的中奖金额不大，而且热衷于彩票的往往都是穷人。

更让人惊讶的是，他们发现获得5万到15万美元奖金的彩民，在5年后破产的概率与奖金少于1万美元的彩民相当。由于奖项大小是随机的，所以在买彩票那个时间点，大奖赢家与小奖赢家之间应该不存在差别。值得注意的是，额外的资金没有被用于偿还债务。

诚然，赢取10万美元确实好像把破产时间推迟了1到2年，因此中奖者在走向破产的道路上应该有过一段愉快的时光。但我还是觉得不能推荐你这么做。找一份工作对解决你的问题将大有裨益。我承认这并非易事，但概率要比中彩票大。

译者/章晴