In America, a whole lot of people spend upwards of $100 billion on lottery tickets each year. States promote these games as a way to raise money for education and other public goods, but it’s not clear just how significant this revenue is in the context of state budgets, or whether there are real trade-offs involved in promoting gambling. And since these games are run as businesses with the goal of maximizing revenues, advertising is necessarily aimed at persuading people to spend their money on them.
Lottery games aren’t just about winning money, they also perpetuate the idea that anyone can get rich in an age of increasing inequality and limited social mobility. They do that by dangling the promise of instant riches to a population that already has a very low tolerance for losing. And they do it by creating new generations of gamblers who will continue to spend more and more on these games.
The first recorded lotteries to offer prizes in the form of money were held in the Low Countries in the 15th century, with local town records showing that citizens used them to raise funds for wall and town fortifications as well as to help the poor. These early lotteries were similar to today’s state lotteries, with the public purchasing a ticket for a drawing at some future date. But innovations in the 1970s transformed state lotteries into the wildly popular instant-game format that we know today. The resulting growth in revenues has led to ever-increasing promotional efforts, and the proliferation of different game formats.