Lottery isn’t just a gambling game; it’s a vehicle through which states raise money for schools and other public-service projects. The prevailing view of the lottery is that it’s a good thing, a way to expand state services without especially onerous taxes on middle- and working-class taxpayers. But the truth is that lottery isn’t a neutral tool: it’s also a form of social engineering.
The word lottery comes from the Latin lotere, meaning “to draw lots.” The practice of drawing lots for purposes of determining fates has a long history, including several instances in the Bible. However, the lottery as a means of distributing material wealth is quite recent. It first came to prominence in the Low Countries during the 15th century. The earliest known public lotteries raised money to repair town fortifications and to help the poor.
In the United States, lottery became popular in the immediate post-World War II period, when states were expanding their array of services and looking for ways to do it without onerous taxes. It also grew at a time when many Americans were losing jobs and seeing incomes fall.
At first, state lotteries were little more than traditional raffles. People bought tickets and waited for a drawing weeks or months in the future. But innovation in the 1970s transformed them into games that offered a lower cost and a faster return on investment. The result was that sales soared. By the early 1980s, revenue surpassed those of all other state enterprises.
By the 1990s, state lotteries had become a dominant force in American life, with more than half of all states offering some kind of lottery game. They were also growing quickly internationally. In Canada, for example, where purchasing a lottery ticket was illegal until 1967, the federal Liberal government introduced an omnibus bill to modernize old laws.
It’s not just the instant riches that attract most players to the lottery; it’s the sense that winning can be your only chance to rise out of poverty. And that sense is particularly pernicious for those living in areas of limited social mobility, where winning the lottery would mean a huge jump into a more desirable class.
The exploitation of this hope is perhaps most evident in the way that the lottery industry markets itself to lower-income neighborhoods. Lottery advertising is chock full of images of people with big smiles and flashing cash. But, as the authors of a recent report found, this marketing is misleading. In fact, studies show that a disproportionate percentage of lottery players and lottery revenues come from middle-income neighborhoods.
Lottery critics point to this regressivity and other features of lottery operations as evidence that it is not doing the social good. But the problem with these criticisms is that they are mostly reactions to, and drivers of, the lottery’s continuing evolution. Lottery decisions are made piecemeal and incrementally, with very little overall oversight, and with the public welfare taken into consideration only intermittently, if at all.