The History of the Lottery

In a lottery, participants pay a small amount of money in exchange for a chance to win a larger sum. Governments often organize lotteries to raise money for public uses, such as building town fortifications or funding wars. The prize is normally a cash award, but some lotteries also offer goods or services.

Unlike most gambling, where winning involves an element of skill, the modern lottery is based on luck. Players select numbers from a range and hope to match them in a random drawing. In addition to state-run lotteries, there are many private, multistate lotteries that offer large prizes to multiple winners. The modern lottery has grown to become one of the world’s largest sources of revenue.

In the fourteen-hundreds, lottery games became common in the Low Countries, where towns raised funds for everything from town fortifications to charity. They eventually spread to England and the colonies, where they were a popular way to fund colonization and military service, in spite of Protestant prohibitions against gambling.

The modern lottery, as Cohen argues, came into being in the nineteen-sixties, when states began struggling to balance budgets while providing an ever-larger array of social safety net services. Faced with rising inflation, the cost of the Vietnam War, and a growing population, many states started casting around for ways to reduce their deficits without raising taxes or cutting services, which would enrage voters.

State-run lotteries were a solution. Lotteries were marketed as a low-cost, no-risk alternative to higher taxes and government spending cuts.