The lottery is the game where participants pay a small sum of money for the chance to win big. They choose numbers from a group of numbers, or have machines randomly spit out numbers for them, and they win prizes if the numbers match those drawn. It is a form of gambling, but it can be very addictive. There’s also the ugly underbelly that it gives people a false sense of meritocracy, that anyone with enough luck can become rich in an age of inequality and limited social mobility.

The practice of making decisions and determining fates by lot has a long history (including several instances in the Bible), but public lotteries for material gains are more recent, with the first recorded ones appearing in burgundy and Flanders in the early 15th century. The word itself may be a calque on Middle Dutch “lotge” (“drawing lots”), or it could come from Middle English “loterie” (the name of a game similar to the lottery that was played with pieces of wood marked with symbols in ancient Rome).

States often argue for their lotteries by touting them as a way to raise funds for specific public goods, such as education. But it is not clear that lotteries actually improve educational outcomes, or that they are a good idea in the first place. Moreover, state governments often rely on lotteries for painless revenue in an anti-tax era, and are under pressure to raise their taxes even as they continue to subsidize the games.