On a recent podcast, we asked this question, would a big bucket of cash really change your life?

The episode was about a 19th century land lottery in Georgia.

For the winners of this lottery, it represented a substantial windfall.

We wanted to know how that windfall affected the winners and more specifically how it affected

the winners' children and grandchildren.

In other words, did the winners just spend the windfall or did they invest it somehow,

helping their future generations live better?

Here's Hoyt Blakely, one of the economists who studied the Georgia land lottery.

We see a really huge change in the wealth of the individuals, but we don't see any difference

in human capital.

We don't see that the children are going to school more.

If your father won the lottery or he lost the lottery, the school attendance rates are pretty

much the same.

The literacy rates are pretty much the same.

As we follow those sons into adulthood, their wealth looks the same.

You know, in a statistical sense, whether their father won the lottery, lost the lottery.

Their occupation looks the same.

The grandchildren aren't going to school more.

The grandchildren aren't more literate.

So what we learned was that future generations of the winners didn't really benefit.

Now, this is just one case study from Antibellum, Georgia.

It can't definitively answer the larger question, which is this?

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