The lottery is a procedure for distributing something—usually money or prizes—among many participants. People pay for the chance to participate in the lottery, and winners are selected by a process that relies on chance. This can be very useful for distributing limited resources, like kindergarten admission at a reputable school or housing units in a crowded neighborhood. It can also be useful for arranging an important event, such as a sporting competition or a vaccine against a fast-moving disease.
Lotteries have been around for centuries. Moses instructed the Israelites to hold a lottery to divide the land, and Roman emperors used them to give away property and slaves. In early America, public lotteries were tangled up with the slave trade as well; George Washington managed a lottery whose prizes included human beings, and one formerly enslaved man won a prize of land and went on to foment slavery rebellions. Lotteries grew to be very popular during the Revolution, and they are still around today—they are the primary means of raising money for college tuition at Dartmouth, Yale, King’s College (now Columbia), William and Mary, and other American colleges and universities.
When lotteries first became a common method of funding public projects, their popularity was based on the fact that they were painless. There was no compulsion to purchase tickets, and the winnings were a small percentage of the total cost. In addition, the prize amounts were often advertised in terms of an “annuity,” or a series of payments, which obscured how much the time value of those dollars was. In the end, though, a winning ticket cost as much as the advertised prize, or more, when taking into account income taxes and withholdings.
As time passed, however, it became clear that the lottery’s true strength was its ability to appeal to people’s irrational gambling habits. People are drawn to the possibility of instant riches, and it’s easy to understand why they would choose to gamble their hard-earned money for a shot at a million dollars or more. Lotteries’ advertising messages have shifted over the years to emphasize this aspect of their appeal. They now rely on two main messages.
The first is that playing the lottery is fun, and they encourage people to play by displaying billboards featuring large jackpots. They’re also savvy enough to realize that making the experience fun obscures its regressive nature. They know that lots of people have these quote-unquote systems that are not based on statistical reasoning, and they know that for some people, the lottery is their only hope of a new life.
The second message is that the lottery will subsidize some government service that everyone agrees is important. It’s an attractive idea, because it’s nonpartisan and doesn’t involve arguing against a specific type of gambling. Once state lotteries were able to refocus their marketing strategy on this point, legalization advocates were able to sell the concept without worrying that they would be voting against education or veterans’ care or something else equally important.