What would you do with a million dollars (euros) ?

In Romania from time to time the National Lottery prize exceeds 1 million euros (or 2 or 3 million, I just take the psychological value into account) and when it does, in most of the times, there is a lot of media coverage especially in the news programs. It’s like all of a sudden everybody in the country is aware that there is a National Lottery (not that the lottery is every week or even twice a week).
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In this media coverage, in certain times, there are street polls where a reporter goes on a street (usually in Bucharest – the capital city) and asks random people (as if people who are on the street at noon are totally random selected) what would they do if they won the lottery? What would they do if they had a million euros (or two or three etc.). What’s really interesting is that all the people that are interviewed (or at least the ones that are shown on TV) somehow manage to give a pretty reasonable answer. Most of them say that they would buy a nice house (and trust me housing is not cheap in Romania’s big cities), they would buy a nice car (oh we have a thing for expensive “show off” cars) or, the older respondents, that they would help their children.
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Taking into account most of the social and economic factors of the Romanian reality all of these are reasonable answers. After all, who would not help their children if they had a lot of money on their hands? Or who would not like to have a nice house and an “image” car to drive on a crappy road?
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What’s really puzzling is that I’ve never seen a street interview session on the topic “What would you do to earn one million euros?”. I guess that’s not a very appealing topic for most of the TV audience, but also I think that the huge majority of respondents would have a big problem in answering the question.
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Let’s take into account that (hypothetically) having one million euros is more valuable than gaining one million euros (that you don’t have) due to lose aversion. Let’s suppose that we have to take into account a discount factor of 50%. But even so, I haven’t seen a street interview on the topic “What would you do to earn 500.000 euros?”.
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The answer is quite simple and is related to cognitive effort. Rank on a scale from 1 to 5 how easy is for you to think (1 really easy and 5 very difficult) about how to spend one million euros. Now rank how easy is to think of how to earn the same sum (or half of it). If you are a normal person you would need a lot less (or significantly less at a p-value < .001 – researchers know why) cognitive effort (aka. Thinking) to conceive how to spend one million euros than how to earn it. .
Thinking (imagining) how to earn half a million euros simply requires too much (intellectual) effort. Many people can’t even come up with one reasonable idea that doesn’t imply robbing a bank or something similar and soon give up with the legendary “I can’t”. On the other hand thinking how to spend one (half a) million euros is much easier. I have a saying that “when you have money to spend, for sure someone will volunteer to help you”. It’s infinitely easier to dream on spending a million euros than it is to conceive a plan to earn that sum of money.
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Now… what can be done? The lottery in any country wants the media attention because if the prize is large so is the number of players which can only mean larger profits for the lottery. What we can do is to try and imagine (think about) how to earn 100.000 euros (1/10 million euros) in the next 3 years. Of course it’s not as glamorous as dreaming of spending 1 million in 1 month and hallucinate that money will last forever. On the other hand it’s much more realistic. What we can do even further is to imagine how to spend 11.000 euros next year in staid of 12.000 and in the same time put 3000 in our savings account. If you do so, for sure you’ll not be on TV the next time the lottery hits the 1 million value, but it’s much more likely that you’ll get more peace.