A lottery is an arrangement in which one or more prizes are allocated by a process that relies entirely on chance. It does not have to involve money: it can include anything from kindergarten admission at a reputable school to units in a subsidized housing block or even the vaccine for a deadly virus.
A common element of lotteries is a system for recording the identities and amounts staked by bettors. This can take many forms, from a simple slip of paper that the bettors write their names on to a numbered ticket that is deposited with the lottery organization for shuffling and possible selection in a drawing. A second common element is some mechanism for determining whether a particular bettor’s number(s) was among the winning ones.
Some lotteries have been in operation for centuries, and the American colonies adopted them extensively during the 1740s to help finance public ventures. The foundation of Princeton and Columbia Universities, for example, was paid for by lotteries, and much of the infrastructure of colonial America was built with funds raised by the lottery.
But lotteries also have a dark side. While they are generally popular with the general population, there is evidence that they promote addictive gambling and can undermine family stability. And although they are considered a “government-sponsored enterprise,” the way that state lotteries are developed and operated suggests that little of the public policy decisionmaking that surrounds them is made with the public interest in mind.
