The lottery is a form of gambling in which people pay money to draw numbers at random and win a prize. Some governments outlaw it, while others endorse it and organize state or national lotteries. It is not a particularly new phenomenon, and it has spread from Europe to America with remarkable rapidity. Its roots are in Middle Dutch loterie, which may be a calque on Old French loterie “action of drawing lots,” or Middle English lottie, perhaps from the verb lot (“to chance”). Lotteries were popular in England before it was colonized, and they helped spread Europe into America, where they continued to thrive even though Protestant proscriptions against gambling made dice and cards illegal.
As America’s prosperity waned in the nineteen sixties—depressed by inflation and the cost of Vietnam—state governments found themselves struggling to balance their budgets without either raising taxes or cutting services. A growing awareness of all the money to be made in gambling, along with a sense that government was running out of ways to raise revenue without irritating an antitax electorate, inspired a sudden surge in state-run lotteries.
In the early days, Cohen writes, lottery advocates argued that since gambling was legal anyway, states should just take advantage of it and pocket the profits. This line of reasoning has limits—it would imply that, for instance, governments should also sell heroin—but it gave moral cover to many voters who approved of state-run gambling.
It also helped to bolster the case that lottery money was being spent wisely. Once states began to see that the lottery wasn’t a magic bullet that could float their entire budgets, however, they shifted strategies. They stopped arguing that it would help all government programs, and instead focused on a single line item, invariably some sort of social service—most often education, but sometimes elder care or public parks. This narrower approach meant that it was easy to convince voters that supporting the lottery was a good way to support veterans or children or whatever.
The problem with this is that it obscures the fact that lottery players are disproportionately lower-income, less educated, and nonwhite. And while the lottery does raise a lot of money, it does so at the expense of those who can least afford to play. It’s a form of gambling that, as Kosenko points out, plays on the human impulse to covet money and the things it can buy—an impulse that is all the more corrosive when the odds are long. In this context, lotteries dangle the promise of a quick fix to society’s ills and, for many of those who play them, that is enough. They go in with their eyes wide open, sure that they are not the only ones who are irrational gamblers and that their chances of winning are slim—but they still feel as if the lottery is their best or last chance for a better life. Hence, all those billboards that say you can win it all with just one ticket.