A lottery is a contest whose winners are chosen at random. It can also refer to any contest where the results depend on chance, such as deciding which judges are assigned to cases or who wins a game of poker. There are also some contests that aren’t officially lotteries but have a similar structure, such as choosing students for schools or selecting members of clubs. In the United States, state governments operate a variety of lotteries, which are run by a public agency or public corporation that is authorized to sell tickets and collect and distribute winnings.
The concept of lotteries has a long history. In the fourteen-hundreds, they were common in the Low Countries, where lottery profits were used to build town fortifications and to help poor people. They were even popular in England, despite Protestant proscriptions against gambling.
During the early eighteen-seventies, however, a new dynamic set in. Growing awareness of the huge profits to be made in the gambling business collided with a crisis in state budgeting. With a population swelling and inflation rising, it was impossible to balance budgets without raising taxes or cutting services. Lotteries offered the prospect of a “painless” revenue stream, with players voluntarily spending money on gambling in return for government funding.
Advocates of the lottery were quick to seize on this message. Lotteries could be sold as a way of funding the kind of essential services that voters wanted their states to provide. It would pay for things like education, health care, social welfare services, and public parks. It could even support veterans’ benefits. This is what made a lot of people believe that supporting the lottery was not just a way to raise taxes but a vote for a better government.
As a result, the lottery became an entrenched feature of state politics. But it was not a panacea. In the end, its main value lay in its capacity to generate vast amounts of cash for state coffers.
By the mid-nineteen-sixties, there were fifteen states with lotteries (Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington), plus the District of Columbia. By the beginning of this century, six more states (Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Tennessee) joined them.
The lottery continues to thrive in America largely because of the large number of middle-aged and elderly men who play it regularly. They represent the largest demographic group in every state, and they are most likely to be regular players—playing on average once a week or more. But the average American household spends only about one percent of its income on lottery tickets. For wealthy people, that figure is only a little higher. In fact, the wealthiest of American families buy fewer tickets than the poorest do. For the rest of us, it’s a lot harder to put down that much dough for an improbable chance at a windfall. In short, the odds of winning the lottery are incredibly slim, but millions do it anyway.