A state-sponsored game of chance offering a cash prize. Each lottery ticket costs one dollar and the state makes a profit from each play. The word lottery is probably a calque on Middle Dutch loterie, and it’s used to describe the action of drawing lots or names for a prize. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lotteries were popular with public officials, who needed a quick way to raise money for projects. Thomas Jefferson held a lottery to pay off debts, and Benjamin Franklin used one to fund the purchase of cannons for Philadelphia.
There’s a certain inextricable human impulse to gamble, and lotteries exploit that. They make the jackpots look huge on billboards, so people think they’re getting rich, even though the odds of winning are long. It’s also true that a small percentage of players, especially the ones who buy the most tickets, can win big. But there’s a lot more to lottery marketing than just making it look like a good deal.
The real moneymaker is a player base that’s disproportionately lower-income, less educated, nonwhite, and male. And the top 30 percent of players make 70 to 80 percent of all sales. Critics say that, by attracting poor and working class people, lotteries are a form of regressive taxation that hits the poor the hardest while allowing the wealthy to avoid paying any taxes at all.