Why People Play the Lottery
A lottery is an arrangement in which prizes are allocated to participants by a process that relies wholly on chance. Prizes may be awarded for a variety of reasons, including raising money for public goods. In the United States, state lotteries are legal and common. They raise billions of dollars each year, and people play them for many different reasons. Some believe winning the lottery is a way to solve all their problems, while others play simply for fun. Regardless of why people play, they should know the odds are slim to none that they will win.
The use of casting lots for material gain has a long history, although the modern state lottery is a relatively recent invention. In the early American colonies, lotteries were used to finance a variety of projects, including road construction and building Harvard and Yale. George Washington even sponsored a lottery to help build roads across the Blue Ridge Mountains. Nevertheless, some scholars and observers argue that the lottery is morally wrong because it promotes covetousness and makes the hope of material riches an end in itself.
While the purchase of lottery tickets cannot be accounted for by decision models based on expected value maximization (tickets cost more than they pay out), more general utility functions based on things other than lottery outcomes can account for some purchases. For example, many purchasers buy lottery tickets to experience a thrill and to indulge in a fantasy of becoming wealthy. The Bible forbids covetousness in several ways, including “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that is his.”
In addition to satisfying an inexplicable human impulse, lottery advertising often aims to exaggerate the likelihood of winning and inflate the current value of money won (prize amounts are usually paid out in annual installments over 20 years, with inflation dramatically eroding their purchasing power). Some critics also contend that the promotion of lotteries promotes a myth of wealth as the answer to all life’s problems, which can lead to a decline in social mobility.
Moreover, the way in which state lotteries are established and evolved demonstrates how public policy is made piecemeal and incrementally, without much overall overview or accountability. Most of the time, officials who oversee a lottery are not able to influence its direction once it is in place, and the objective fiscal health of a state is rarely taken into consideration.