A competition based on chance in which numbered tickets are sold and prizes given to the holders of those numbers; sometimes used as a means of raising funds for a state or a charity.

Lotteries have long been a popular pastime. Benjamin Franklin ran a lottery in Philadelphia to help fund the city’s militia for defense against French marauders; John Hancock ran one to help build Boston’s Faneuil Hall, and George Washington tried one to finance the construction of a road across a mountain pass. In the seventeenth century, the practice spread to the Low Countries and then to England, where in the fourteen-hundreds Queen Elizabeth I chartered a national lottery with profits designated for “reparation of the Havens and Strength of the Realme.”

In the modern era, however, states have come to see lotteries as “budgetary miracles,” writes Cohen: Lottery revenues can appear almost out of nowhere, relieving politicians of the unpleasant task of increasing taxes. The underlying dynamic, he says, is that voters want states to spend more, but they do not want to be taxed for it. The lottery allows legislators to maintain existing government services without having to raise taxes, and the public perceives the funds as coming from a source of “painless” revenue: affluent players who spend their money voluntarily.

For decades, state lotteries were little more than traditional raffles, with the public buying tickets for a drawing at some future date. But innovations in the 1970s, such as a game that allowed people to choose their own numbers (instead of being assigned them), transformed these lotteries. As a result, jackpots grew to enormous sums and earned the games windfalls of free publicity on news websites and newscasts.