Lottery is a game in which tokens, such as numbers or symbols, are randomly distributed to participants and winners are selected by a random drawing. A lottery may be used to select students for a school program, to assign spaces in a campground, or to award medals in a competition. It may also refer to a situation in which something is decided by chance: They considered combat duty a lottery.
Although financial lotteries have been criticized as addictive forms of gambling, some of the money raised by them is used for good causes in the public sector. In some cases, a lottery is the only way to obtain a certain commodity or service that has high demand but is limited in supply. For example, children’s admission to a reputable kindergarten is often awarded by lottery; so is a subsidized apartment in a desirable neighborhood.
One of the most basic requirements for a lottery is some way to record the identities of those who place bets and the amount they stake. Typically, this takes the form of a pool or collection of tickets or their counterfoils from which winning tokens (numbers, symbols, or other markings) are extracted. These must be thoroughly mixed by mechanical means (shaking, tossing, etc.) or by computer, which makes it easier to determine if the bettor’s ticket is among the winners. A percentage of the total pool normally goes toward expenses and profits for the lottery organizer or sponsor, while a larger portion is available to winning participants.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lotteries became widely practiced in Europe and America, despite Protestant prohibitions against gambling. They were particularly popular in the Low Countries, where they were used to finance everything from town fortifications and town halls to charity for the poor. In early America, lotteries arose out of exigency: colonial governments were short on revenue and long on needs for public works. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were all financed partially through them, as was the Continental Congress’s attempt to fund the Revolutionary War.
Lotteries’ rise in popularity accelerated after World War II, when the economy boomed and tax revenues dipped. In many states, legislatures viewed lotteries as a painless alternative to raising taxes. Legalization advocates shifted strategy, moving away from portraying a lottery as a panacea for the state budget and instead arguing that it would merely cover “a single line item—invariably a popular nonpartisan service, like education or elder care.”
These new arguments resonated with a large segment of the population, especially those who are most opposed to raising taxes. The resulting popularity of lotteries has been a serious setback for tax reformers, who now have to work harder to sell the idea that a lottery is a better way to raise revenue than raising income or sales taxes. But they can’t avoid the truth: Lotteries are, by design, a kind of gambling—and they do indeed generate substantial sums of money. The problem is that the prizes are enormously inflated, and winners, even when they don’t have gambling addictions, can find themselves worse off than they were before they won.