Making decisions and determining fates by the casting of lots has an ancient history. But using lottery games to raise money and distribute prize money for material gain is a much more recent development. It first surfaced in the fourteen-hundreds, in cities like Bruges, Belgium, where it was used to pay for town repairs and to help the poor.
It became common in England, and was brought to America by early colonists as a way to finance European settlement of the continent, despite Protestant prohibitions against gambling. It then spread throughout the world, and today it is a popular form of raising funds for all sorts of projects, from municipal repairs to funding research in AIDS, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.
The prevailing argument for state lotteries has always been that they provide a painless source of public revenue, in which voters voluntarily spend their money to help pay for public services without raising taxes on other citizens. This is an attractive proposition, and it has worked to support state governments in times of fiscal crisis.
But there are problems with the concept. It is based on the illusion of unimaginable wealth, and it has coincided with a decline in financial security for most Americans. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, income gaps widened, retirement and health-care costs rose, and the longstanding national promise that hard work and thrift would ensure children were better off than their parents ceased to be true.