Lottery is a game in which people pay to buy tickets for a chance to win a prize based on numbers drawn by machines or randomly selected. The first recorded lotteries were in the Low Countries in the 15th century, where towns used them to raise funds for construction projects and to help the poor. In modern times, states run a lottery to generate public revenue for a variety of uses.
Despite the widespread popularity of the lottery, few people understand how it works. The big prize winners get 50-60% of the total prize pool, and the rest gets divvied up between administrative costs and vendor fees, plus toward whatever each state designates. In practice, this means that most of the money goes to convenience store operators (who tend to be major lottery vendors) and politicians (who become accustomed to the extra income).
I’ve spoken to people who play the lottery regularly, who spend $50 or $100 a week on tickets. They all say that they feel it’s their civic duty to support the state, or the children, or whatever. But I’ve never seen anyone put the percentage of overall state revenues that lottery profits raise into context.
The way that the lottery works is not unlike the way that most government decisions are made, in that it’s done piecemeal and incrementally, with little or no oversight from a general perspective. Once a lottery is established, it tends to grow in size and complexity as a result of pressure for additional revenues from specific groups such as convenience store operators, suppliers (who are often heavy contributors to state political campaigns), teachers (in states where lotteries use revenue to fund education), and state legislators.