Lottery is a game where people buy tickets for a chance to win a prize, often large sums of money. Governments also run lotteries to raise funds. Lottery is one form of gambling, but governments have long been reluctant to ban it or regulate it. Lotteries are also a way to tax people without raising taxes or cutting services, which would be unpopular with voters.
In the Low Countries in the fifteenth century, towns used lotteries to build town fortifications and to provide charity for the poor. The practice spread to England, where Queen Elizabeth I chartered the nation’s first lottery in 1606. Lotteries were popular in America, too, despite Protestant prohibitions against gambling. They helped finance early American settlement, and they became common in the colonies themselves. One formerly enslaved man, Denmark Vesey, won a South Carolina lottery and used his winnings to foment a slave rebellion.
In the modern era, as Cohen shows, this national obsession with winning the jackpot coincided with a dramatic decline in financial security for many Americans. As wages fell and debt rose, pensions and health-care costs increased, and job security eroded, it became harder and harder for working families to pay their bills and raise a family. As a result, in the late nineteen-sixties, state governments faced the dilemma of balancing their budgets by raising taxes or cutting services. Lotteries offered a solution that was both cheap and easy to administer. By selling state-sponsored lottery games, politicians could pocket the profits and avoid a public outcry about raising taxes.