The odds of winning a lottery are abysmal. But a lot of people still play the games, even after state governments acknowledge that winning a big jackpot would likely ruin their lives. They are betting that their luck will change, or that they have a better shot at happiness than other people do. Lottery players tend to be poorer, less educated, and nonwhite. They buy fewer tickets, but the ones they do buy are more frequent, and the amount of money they spend is greater. Some even form syndicates to buy large numbers of tickets, which boosts their chances of winning but reduces the payouts each time.
The first public lotteries began in England and spread to the colonies despite Protestant prohibitions against gambling. They helped finance the American Revolution and provided funds for several colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, William and Mary, Union, and Brown. In the nineteenth century, lotteries were a major source of revenue for states, but their popularity waned as inflation accelerated and the Vietnam War strained state coffers. In the nineteen-sixties, a growing awareness of the profits to be made in gambling collided with America’s tax revolt, and states began looking for ways to balance their budgets without raising taxes or cutting services.
In the early days of state-run gambling, advocates used a variety of arguments to convince voters that the lottery was a harmless form of entertainment and an efficient alternative to raising taxes or cutting programs. The idea was that people were going to gamble anyway, so the government might as well collect some of the proceeds. This reasoning was limited—by its logic, governments should also sell heroin—but it did give cover to people who wanted to legalize the lottery.
Lotteries are based on the premise that a lot of numbers are randomly selected and some of them will be drawn. In the simplest cases, the prize is money, but other prizes can include goods and services. A common example is a lottery for subsidized housing units or kindergarten placements at a reputable school.
Whether states have the right to offer such lotteries is a debate that will continue until people’s views on the morality of gambling are changed. Those who oppose the lottery typically argue that it is a “tax on stupidity,” meaning that players either don’t understand how unlikely it is to win or simply enjoy the game. But defenders of the lottery point to studies showing that the probability of winning a prize increases with the number of tickets purchased, and they argue that the lottery is not as harmful as some other forms of gambling, such as horse racing and video poker. But a recent study of the effect of lotteries on the quality of life found that, while they do provide some benefits, those benefits are minimal and come at a high cost to society. The authors conclude that state policymakers should consider limiting the number of available lottery tickets and restricting their use to groups of low-income people who are most likely to benefit from them.