A lottery is a form of gambling in which numbers are drawn for prizes. The games are run by state governments and have a number of different formats. Some states also have instant-win scratch-off games. The vast majority of lottery players are poor. Rich people play, too—three asset managers won one of the largest jackpots ever, a quarter of a billion dollars—but they buy fewer tickets than the poor, and their purchases represent a much smaller percentage of their income. The lottery industry is not above exploiting psychological addiction; everything from the look of a ticket to the math behind it is designed to keep players coming back.
The lottery’s modern incarnation arose in the nineteen-sixties, when states’ budgets ran into trouble amid the postwar boom. As Cohen explains, lotteries offered states a way to solve their financial problems without raising taxes or cutting services—both options unpopular with voters.
Lotteries have a long history in America, though they were not always used for public good. In early America they were often tangled up with the slave trade, and Washington himself managed a lottery in which some of the prizes were human beings; Denmark Vesey won that prize and went on to foment slavery rebellions. But the lottery became popular in the late eighteenth century because it provided a means for states to raise money for everything from civil defense to church construction.
The basic elements of a lottery are the same everywhere: some way to record the identities and stakes of all bettors; a mechanism for pooling these stakes (usually through a centralized organization); and a drawing for prizes, the winner to be determined by some means of selection at random. Lotteries are now common in the United States, with 37 states and the District of Columbia offering them.