Lottery is a form of gambling in which people pay money to be given something, often cash, in exchange for a chance at winning bigger prizes. It’s a common activity in sports, but also in real life: lottery-style arrangements are used to determine kindergarten placements at reputable public schools, units in subsidized housing blocks, and even vaccines for fast-moving diseases.

In its most basic form, a lottery involves randomly spitting out groups of numbers and selecting winners who match enough of those numbers to win the jackpot. But there’s much more to it than that. People don’t play the lottery just because they want to gamble; they do it because it dangles the promise of instant riches in an age of inequality and limited social mobility. They see billboards touting the size of the Mega Millions and Powerball jackpots, and they start dreaming.

The lottery is also a way for state governments to avoid having to raise taxes and avoid getting punished at the polls. It’s a “budgetary miracle,” as Cohen puts it, where states can make revenue appear seemingly out of thin air. In the immediate postwar period, when many states faced rapidly increasing costs but could not increase sales or income taxes, legislators turned to lotteries to rake in billions.

But critics point out that lotteries are still a form of hidden tax, with poor people paying the most for their chances at a new fortune. Indeed, a study showed that rich people buy far fewer tickets than poor ones do (unless they’re playing for Powerball). The average player earning more than fifty thousand dollars per year spends one percent of his or her annual income on lottery tickets; the average poor person spends thirteen percent.

As a result, lottery revenue is responsive to economic fluctuations: Sales rise when incomes fall and unemployment increases; they decline when employment and poverty rates go up. And, as is the case with most commercial products, lottery advertising is heavily concentrated in neighborhoods that are disproportionately poor, black, or Latino.

Early in American history, lotteries were a central part of both private and public life. In the seventeenth century, many colonial towns used them to finance public buildings, including libraries and churches. Lotteries were also important to the military. The Continental Congress once managed a lottery whose prizes included human beings, and George Washington once ran a slave lottery in Virginia. And of course, as in other times and places, lotteries were tangled up with slavery, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

In the end, there isn’t really a good answer as to why so many Americans love to play the lottery. It could be that they’re just plain old stupid, or maybe it’s an inextricable human impulse. But there is a larger issue: It’s a system that dangles the possibility of instant riches in front of millions of people who desperately need a better life. And that is a terrible thing to do.