A lottery is a game in which participants pay money to enter for the chance to win a prize, often cash. While making decisions or determining fates by casting lots has a long history (see, for example, the Bible), public lotteries in which people pay to participate and win prizes are of more recent origin. The first recorded lotteries that offered tickets for sale with prizes in the form of money were held in the Low Countries in the 15th century, raising funds to repair town fortifications and aid the poor.
The founding fathers were big into lotteries: Benjamin Franklin ran a lottery to raise money to build Philadelphia’s Faneuil Hall, and John Hancock and George Washington used them to fund the construction of roads over mountain passes. Nowadays, state lotteries are a staple of American society. Americans spend $100 billion on tickets every year. This is a huge chunk of the national economy. But the odds of winning are incredibly long. This fact makes the lottery a form of gambling, and that means it should be subject to scrutiny.
But the way we talk about the lottery obscures its regressive impact on low-income Americans and its underlying flaws. In particular, we tend to treat the lottery as a harmless pastime that’s fun to play, instead of as an expensive habit with big tax implications and a risky promise of instant riches. This misguided belief helps obscure how much people spend on tickets and why they keep spending.