Lottery is a game in which people pay money for a chance to win big prizes, typically cash. Lotteries are run by governments and, as a result, the proceeds from the games support a range of public projects and social programs. Nevertheless, critics charge that government lottery advertising is at cross-purposes with the public interest: It focuses on persuading people to spend their money on the game; it tries to maximize revenues; it promotes gambling; it misrepresents odds and jackpot amounts; it inflates prize amounts (lottery prizes are usually paid over many years, with inflation and taxes dramatically eroding the current value); and it encourages poorer people and problem gamblers to gamble for large sums.
Despite these objections, in the modern world almost every state has a lottery. The reasons for its introduction are remarkably similar: voters want states to spend more; politicians look at lotteries as an efficient source of “painless” revenue; and, if the games are run well, they are very popular with the general population.
But is this the best way to spend taxpayers’ money? In fact, the emergence of the modern lottery system has created a number of other problems. The major ones are: the difficulty of managing a new form of gambling (which is very different from the distribution of property in a land survey or in the giving of gifts at Saturnalian feasts); the tendency of people to engage in it for fun, even when they know that it is unlikely to make them wealthy; and the difficulty of designing effective public policies to prevent the lottery from becoming addictive.