Lottery is a scheme for the distribution of prizes by chance, in which numbered tickets representing prizes or blanks are drawn. Ticket sales are regulated by law in most states.
In 2021, Americans bought more than $100 billion in lottery tickets, making the games America’s most popular form of gambling. But while lottery proceeds help state coffers, those low-dollar tickets come with a hidden cost: They prey on the economically disadvantaged.
The people who buy the most tickets tend to be lower-income, less educated, nonwhite, and less affluent—and, studies show, more likely to be addicted to gambling. And that’s the population that state-run lotteries rely on, getting 70 to 80 percent of their revenue from just 10 percent of players.
These are people who often buy more than one ticket a week, and sometimes several times per day. They know the odds of winning are slim, and they have quotes-unquote “systems” to play by, like buying their tickets in specific stores at certain times of day. And they do so because they believe in the power of a chance. They also know that while they won’t win a big prize, they might have a good chance of winning something smaller. That’s the message that lottery commissions sell. And they sell it well, so that even people who don’t usually gamble end up spending money on tickets.