Official lottery games are a fixture in American life. People spent more than $100 billion on tickets in 2021, making it the country’s most popular form of gambling. State lotteries are promoted as a way to raise revenue, and the funds raised have helped pay for everything from highways to schools. But is it worth the trade-offs for society?

The answer, historians have found, depends on what a state’s goals were at the time it introduced a lottery. In the immediate post-World War II period, states were desperately searching for ways to maintain their existing services without enraging an anti-tax electorate. “Lotteries were budgetary miracles,” writes Cohen, allowing states to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue “seemingly out of thin air.”

Some people simply like to gamble. And that’s fine, as long as we understand that it isn’t the only reason for playing. The real issue with the lottery is that it offers a false promise of instant riches in an age of inequality and limited social mobility.

Those with lower incomes spend more on lottery tickets, and studies have shown that sales increase as the economy falters and unemployment grows. The ads for lottery games are often disproportionately seen in communities that are disproportionately poor and black, and critics say they encourage those people to believe that gambling is inevitable and a good way to get rich. Those beliefs are part of why the lottery is a regressive tax on Americans.