The practice of making decisions or determining fates by drawing lots has a long history, going back to biblical times and beyond. Roman emperors gave away property and slaves by lottery, and the game was so popular that it was even included in one of the dinner entertainments at Saturnalian feasts—an event for which you could use your own lottery tickets. In modern times the lottery is perhaps best known as a government-sponsored form of gambling. But, as Cohen shows, state lotteries have been used for many purposes, including helping finance public works and, more recently, to help balance the budget of states struggling in an anti-tax era.
The history of the lottery is complicated, but Cohen focuses on its modern incarnation, which began in the nineteen-sixties when growing awareness of all the money to be made in the gambling business collided with a crisis in state funding. The post-World War II period was one in which states could afford to expand their array of services without particularly onerous taxes on middle and working classes, but by the nineteen-sixties that arrangement was beginning to crumble due to inflation and the cost of the Vietnam War.
States desperately searched for ways to cut their budgets without enraging the anti-tax electorate, and they discovered that the comparatively painless lottery was an appealing solution. The idea was that people would be willing to gamble a small amount in order to avoid paying higher taxes, and in return the state would generate vast sums of revenue to finance essential services. The public was a little skeptical at first, but once the games were established, they became very popular.
In the early years of the lottery, it was criticized for its regressive effects on lower-income families, and some of the early games were tangled up in the slave trade (one enslaved man bought his freedom through a Virginia lottery, for instance). But these concerns were eventually subsumed by the overwhelming popularity of the games, which were advertised to the public as being not much riskier than farming or going out to lunch.
As the century wore on, the success of the lottery was so great that politicians came to see it as an essential part of the government’s fiscal policy. It was a way of raising taxes in a way that did not provoke a voter revolt, and it was also a way to encourage economic growth, since lottery proceeds were a significant source of tax-free income for individuals. These considerations have given rise to a wide variety of concerns about the lottery that Cohen addresses, ranging from its addiction-prone nature to its alleged regressive effect on lower-income groups. But these criticisms are largely reactions to, and drivers of, the continuing evolution of the industry—an industry that, Cohen writes, has become an indispensable element in America’s fiscal policy. And that is a fact that many of us will be familiar with when we see the huge jackpots on those big billboards on the highway.