The Public Interest and the Lottery

The lottery is a form of gambling in which players pay small sums of money for the chance to win a large prize, often a lump sum of cash. State lotteries are common in the United States, where they have raised over $1 trillion. The money raised by the lotteries is used for a variety of purposes, including public education, highway construction, and public works projects. The lottery is the largest source of tax-exempt revenue for many states. The first state to introduce a lottery was New Hampshire in 1964, and since then, more than 37 states have adopted the game.

The popularity of the lottery is rooted in several different factors. In part, it reflects growing economic inequality and a sense that anyone can become rich by investing enough time and money. In addition, popular anti-tax movements led many legislators to seek out alternatives to traditional forms of raising taxes, and the lottery provided an attractive alternative.

Unlike many other types of gambling, the lottery is generally not illegal in most jurisdictions, and the lottery commissions have worked hard to promote the game as harmless entertainment. But this message is misleading and obscures the regressive nature of the lottery, which disproportionately affects low-income people and has significant negative consequences for problem gamblers. The lottery is also a classic example of a government function that operates at cross-purposes with the broader public interest. State lotteries are run as businesses with a mandate to maximize revenues, and this requires aggressive marketing and promotion. In turn, this promotes gambling and leads to problems that the government could and should prevent.

Although the casting of lots for decisions and determining fates has a long history, public lotteries are much more recent, beginning with the 1612 drawing for the Virginia Company of London’s settlement in America. Lotteries were widely used in colonial era America to finance infrastructure and other public works, such as the paving of streets and building wharves. Benjamin Franklin even sponsored a lottery in 1776 to raise funds for cannons to defend Philadelphia from the British.

Lottery profits are primarily derived from ticket sales, and they typically expand rapidly after their introduction, then level off and may begin to decline. This has prompted the introduction of new games, such as keno and video poker, to maintain and even increase revenues. In addition, the industry has benefited from innovations in distribution, such as scratch-off tickets. This has reduced the cost of distributing the prizes and increased convenience for consumers, as well as increasing the number of possible winners. The distribution of lottery profits to education is based on Average Daily Attendance and full-time enrollment for K-12 schools, and by county for higher education. See the County Lottery Contributions page for details. Each row represents a lottery application, and each column shows the position it was awarded (from first on the left to one hundredth on the right). The color of each cell indicates how many times the application was awarded that position.