Lottery is a state-run contest that promises big bucks to the lucky winners. It can also refer to any contest in which a limited number of participants can win a prize, from finding true love to being struck by lightning. In the financial lottery, players pay a small fee, select a group of numbers, or have machines randomly spit out them, and win prizes if enough of their choices match those selected at random.
The practice of selecting things by chance dates back thousands of years. The ancients used it for everything from distributing property to slaves to deciding who would keep Jesus’ clothes after the Crucifixion. Nero, king of the Roman Empire, was a fan; as were many Renaissance explorers and sixteenth-century Italian statesmen trying to raise money for civic projects or the poor.
In colonial America, lottery play was widespread and a major source of funds for public and private ventures: roads, churches, libraries, canals, bridges, and colleges. Some of these were built by enslaved people, and one formerly enslaved man, Denmark Vesey, purchased his freedom through a South Carolina lottery and went on to foment a slave rebellion.
Lotteries came into the modern era in the nineteen-sixties, when state budget crises, caused by inflation and the Vietnam War, made it impossible for many states to balance their books without raising taxes or cutting services. Advocates of legalization had to change their pitch, Cohen writes: no longer arguing that the lottery could float a state’s entire budget, they started claiming it could support only a single line item, invariably some popular, nonpartisan government service such as education or elder care.