The lottery is a national pastime that generates billions in revenue each year, but it has serious costs. While many people play the lottery for fun, it can become an addictive form of gambling and a way to try to replace other forms of risk taking. It is important to understand how the lottery works in order to avoid its dangers. The odds of winning are slim, but many people still find it difficult to resist the temptation.
The first lotteries were created to raise money for public projects such as town fortifications and town squares. By the fourteenth century, these were common in the Low Countries and in England. In the seventeenth century, settlers brought the practice to the American colonies where it became an important means of financing private and public ventures such as roads, canals, churches, colleges, universities, and even military expeditions and wars. During the French and Indian Wars, the colonial governments also used lotteries to fund fortifications, local militia, and even the building of Faneuil Hall in Boston.
In the early modern era, lotteries formed a rare point of agreement between Thomas Jefferson, who saw them as no more risky than agriculture, and Alexander Hamilton, who grasped what would prove to be the essential truth: that most people “would rather have a small chance of great riches than a large chance of little.”
Lotteries were especially popular in the northeastern states where legislators could use them to maintain government services without increasing taxes on poor and middle-class residents, who might object. But it was in the nation’s tax revolt of the late twentieth century that the lottery became a fixture of state life, spreading south and west as states looked for budgetary miracles that wouldn’t enrage their anti-tax electorates.
During this period, the lottery began to offer state officials a false sense of security, a way to avoid raising taxes and thereby reawaken voters’ hostility to taxes in general. The fact that the lottery generated so much money was convincing to politicians, Cohen writes, because it reinforced the myth that the country had a “meritocratic” economy in which everyone—through hard work and diligence—would eventually achieve unimaginable wealth. But the truth is that the average family’s income stagnated, job security declined, health-care costs soared, and the long-standing national promise that education and hard work would make children better off than their parents ceased to be true.
Lottery revenues now comprise an enormous part of state budgets, but the question is whether they justify those costs. The answer depends on how much we value the ability of people to control their own financial lives and on how much we value the idea that everyone has a chance to improve them. We should also consider the effect of a lottery’s messages on young people, who are more likely to be influenced by it than their older counterparts. The lottery’s message to young people is that it’s possible to win the jackpot by simply choosing your numbers and hoping for the best.
