A lottery is a form of gambling in which participants pay for a chance to win a prize, such as money or goods. The prizes may be predetermined or selected in a random drawing, and the games are often organized by states as a way of raising funds for government projects. In the United States, lotteries are a regulated industry, and profits are used exclusively for public purposes.
In the fourteen-hundreds, for instance, England subsidized colonial settlement through lotteries, which were popular in the colonies, despite Protestant prohibitions against gambling. In the nineteen-sixties, states faced budget crises as the costs of providing a social safety net and paying for the Vietnam War escalated, but they feared raising taxes or cutting services, both options that would enrage voters. Lotteries offered a solution, generating revenue without raising taxes.
During the seventies, New Hampshire and Connecticut established lotteries, followed by thirteen more states during the nineteen-eighties (Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington), and then six more in the early nineteen-nineties. The state-run lotteries quickly grew, fueled by a growing awareness of the profits to be made in the gambling business and a need for states to find ways to finance their governments without infuriating their voters.
But the growth of the lottery has also highlighted a fundamental problem in American politics. As Cohen argues, lotteries are an example of how policy decisions are made piecemeal and incrementally, with little or no overall vision. As a result, lottery officials must continuously adjust their policies in order to stay competitive, and the results are that state lotteries have become addictive, just like cigarettes and video games.