Lottery is an old game. It was played in the Roman Empire (Nero was a fan), and it is attested to throughout the Bible, where people cast lots for everything from choosing who should be king to divining God’s will. It is a common pastime, and it is one that has become deeply woven into American culture. It is also, as many studies have shown, an incredibly addictive one. In fact, people who play the lottery regularly are twice as likely to have gambling problems as those who do not.
Moreover, lottery playing is a highly regressive practice. The vast majority of lottery players are in the 21st through 60th percentiles of income distribution, which means that they do not have much disposable income left after paying for essentials. As a result, they spend a very large percentage of their income on lottery tickets. But despite this, they still believe that their winning numbers will come up, and that a jackpot of even a small amount will change their lives.
This is a very dangerous proposition, and it has been responsible for numerous tragedies. In the early days of the lottery, people often bought tickets with slaves as their prizes. George Washington managed a Virginia lottery that included human beings, and Denmark Vesey won a South Carolina lottery prize and went on to foment a slave rebellion. In addition, lottery games became tangled up with slavery in other ways. In a time when Thomas Jefferson viewed the practice as little riskier than farming, Alexander Hamilton grasped that lottery winners tended to prefer a very small chance of winning a big prize to a very large chance of winning a smaller prize.
The lottery’s modern incarnation began in the nineteen-sixties, when a growing awareness of all the money to be made in gambling collided with a crisis in state finances. Thanks to soaring inflation and the cost of Vietnam, America’s postwar prosperity began to crumble, and it became difficult for states to balance their budgets without raising taxes or cutting services. In the face of these pressures, lawmakers turned to the lottery as a way to generate revenue seemingly out of thin air.
Cohen argues that the lottery’s detractors are misguided. He writes that they rely on the idea that players do not understand the odds and do not know that they are being duped, which is untrue. Instead, he says, they assume that the state should simply profit from people’s addiction to the game.
In his research, Cohen talked to a number of lottery players. These were people who had been buying tickets for years, spending $50 or $100 a week. They argued that the odds were long, but they believed that their purchases were a sort of civic duty. They felt that they were supporting their schools and children, and that, if they lost, they would have done a good thing. These arguments are illogical, but they were effective at generating support for the lottery.