The lottery is a form of gambling in which a large number of tickets are sold and a drawing is held for prizes. It can also refer to any event whose outcome appears to be determined by chance:
Lottery is an enormous industry, with some 186,000 retailers selling tickets in the United States, according to a 2003 survey. The majority of them are convenience stores, but others include churches and fraternal organizations, gas stations, restaurants and bars, bowling alleys, and newsstands. In addition, many retailers sell tickets online.
Making decisions and determining fates by the drawing of lots has a long history in human society, including references in the Bible. The practice became especially widespread in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when it was used to finance a variety of public projects, including towns and cities, wars, and colleges. It later spread to America, where Benjamin Franklin ran a lottery in 1748 to raise money for Boston’s Faneuil Hall and George Washington ran one to fund the construction of a road across Virginia’s Mountain Road.
A modern state lottery usually begins by enacting a statute granting it a legal monopoly. Then it hires a government agency or public corporation to run the lottery (as opposed to licensing a private firm in return for a share of the profits). It starts operations with a modest number of relatively simple games and, due to pressure to increase revenues, progressively expands its offerings of games and their complexity.
Initially, the popularity of lottery games was driven by their super-sized jackpots, which attract attention in newspaper headlines and on TV and radio. As lottery advertising has evolved, however, the monetary value of the prize (which is typically paid in equal annual installments over 20 years, with inflation and taxes dramatically eroding its current value) has become less important. What matters to lottery players is the combined utility of non-monetary benefits, such as entertainment or the opportunity to improve their lives.
Although the lottery is a popular activity, some people argue that it is unethical because it violates basic ethical principles such as fairness and honesty. Some also claim that it promotes gambling addiction. In general, most scholars who study the lottery have found that the social cost of the activity is substantially greater than its economic benefits.
A fundamental problem with the lottery is that, like most forms of public policy, it is created and operated piecemeal and incrementally, and the overall welfare of the community is taken into consideration only intermittently. It is a classic example of how government at any level, be it local, county, or state, often comes to rely on a revenue source that it can neither manage nor control. Moreover, once a lottery is established, it is difficult to reverse the direction of its evolution. Therefore, any state government that establishes a lottery should be aware of the potential for its dependence on lottery revenues and take steps to limit those resources.