Lottery is a process in which prizes are allocated by chance to people who pay an entry fee. This is most commonly a sum of money, but can also be other goods or services such as kindergarten admission, placement in a subsidized housing unit, a coveted medical treatment or even a sports team draft pick.
The lottery has long been a popular form of public finance, with early American examples including Benjamin Franklin’s unsuccessful 1776 attempt to raise funds for cannons to defend Philadelphia against the British and George Washington’s 1768 lottery for roads across Virginia. Lotteries waned in popularity during the colonial period, but the process was revived in 1964 with New Hampshire’s introduction of a state lottery. Since then, more than two dozen states have adopted the practice.
One of the primary arguments made in favor of a lottery is that it provides a source of
But the evidence indicates that this argument is unsubstantiated. Studies show that a lottery’s popularity is not related to its contribution to state revenues, and that it has broad and stable public approval regardless of the actual fiscal conditions of a state. Lotteries are especially popular during times of economic stress, but they also receive strong public support when the state is in good financial condition.
A key aspect of a lottery is the drawing, which determines which tickets will be awarded prizes. The tickets or counterfoils must be thoroughly mixed by some mechanical means, such as shaking or tossing, and then a random number or symbol is selected. The drawing may be done by hand or with a computer, the latter being increasingly used for its capacity to store large amounts of data and generate random numbers.
In the case of state-run lotteries, the proceeds from ticket sales are used to award a fixed amount of prizes, and a portion is retained as organizing and promotion costs and profits for the lottery. The remaining percentage is available for winnings, and the size of the prize depends on the number of tickets sold and the frequency of drawings. The most popular games are those with very large prizes, and ticket sales tend to increase dramatically for rollover drawings.
Despite the popularity of these games, lottery participation is highly unequal by socioeconomic status. Clotfelter and Cook report that the majority of lottery players come from middle-income neighborhoods, while lower-income communities play the lottery at significantly less than their percentage of the state’s population. In addition, men are more likely to play than women; blacks and Hispanics to play, but not whites; the young to play, but not the elderly; and Catholics to play, but not Protestants. All of these factors, combined with the fact that winning is largely a matter of chance, contribute to the regressive nature of lottery playing.