A lottery is a game of chance in which winners are selected at random. It is a popular form of gambling that encourages people to pay a small sum in order to be in with a chance of winning a large prize, often administered by state or national governments. The process of making decisions by drawing lots has a long history, and lotteries can be found in many different contexts, including sports team drafts, allocation of scarce medical treatment, and public works projects.
State lotteries are thriving, with Americans spending an estimated $100 billion annually on tickets. But they didn’t always have this popularity, and their evolution has left a trail of troubling questions.
Lottery is a word that means “drawing of lots.” The term’s roots are uncertain, but it probably derives from Middle Dutch lotinge, which may be a calque on Middle French loterie, both of which mean “action of drawing lots” (thus the Oxford English Dictionary). There were early private games, and in 1612 King James I authorized the Virginia Company to run a lottery to help finance ships to the colony of Virginia. Although Puritans saw gambling as a door and window to worse sins, by the 1670s, it was well established in New England.
The founding fathers were big fans of lotteries. Benjamin Franklin ran one to raise money for the city of Philadelphia and John Hancock used lotteries to finance Boston’s Faneuil Hall. George Washington also ran a lottery to fund a road over a mountain pass in Virginia, but the lottery failed to earn enough to make the project feasible.
Once a lottery is established, it becomes difficult to stop it. State legislators are reluctant to impose controls, and the lottery’s managers, in turn, have little interest in changing policy. The result is that lottery policies evolve piecemeal and incrementally, with the public’s welfare considered only intermittently, if at all.
Lottery revenues often expand dramatically after a lottery’s introduction, but they eventually level off and even decline. This leads to the introduction of new games to maintain revenues, which may have the unintended consequence of fostering dependency on state funding.
The odds of winning the lottery are very low, and they don’t increase with the frequency of play or the number of tickets purchased. So why do so many people play? The answer, in part, is that they feel they have done a good deed by buying a ticket. Even if they don’t win, the sense of having fulfilled their civic duty helps explain why so many Americans are able to justify spending so much on lotteries, while others struggle to have even $400 in an emergency savings account. That should be a wake-up call to all of us. It’s time to change the way we think about lotteries.