The Problems of the Lottery
The lottery is a game wherein participants pay for tickets that are drawn in order to win prizes. The prizes may be money, goods or services. The game has a long history in many cultures, and there are various kinds of lotteries, including those where people compete for housing units or kindergarten placements at a particular public school. However, the lottery that is most familiar to Americans is a game in which players try to match the numbers on their ticket to those that are randomly drawn by a machine or human judge. The first recorded public lotteries with prize money in the form of cash were held in the 15th century in towns in the Low Countries to raise money for town fortifications and to help the poor.
The state-sponsored lottery is a classic case of public policy being made by a series of incremental and fragmented decisions, with the general welfare of citizens not always taken into consideration. The state legislates a monopoly; establishes an agency or public corporation to run the lottery; begins operations with a small number of relatively simple games; and, due to continuous pressure for revenue, progressively expands its offerings.
A key issue with the lottery is that it encourages covetousness. It lures people in with promises that their life will improve if they can only hit the jackpot. It is a violation of one of the Ten Commandments: ” Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, his wife, his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that is his.”
In addition to its pernicious effects on poverty, the lottery has created a complex web of social problems. It can be a vehicle for dishonest business practices, such as selling tickets to minors or allowing vendors to profit from lottery proceeds by selling tickets to the same customers more than once. It also can be a source of corruption, with lottery officials using the proceeds for their own purposes rather than for promoting a legitimate public purpose.
While irrational gambling behavior is common in lotteries, there are plenty of lottery players who go in clear-eyed about the odds and how they work. They know that the odds are long and they have developed a system for playing, including avoiding certain groups of numbers and specific stores or times of day to buy tickets. These people defy the expectations that you might have, based on what you read in the newspaper or hear on television, that lottery players are idiots who have been duped and don’t understand the odds. Yet they continue to play, often spending $50 or $100 a week. How do they do it? The answer lies in a deep understanding of the math behind probability and proven strategies. These players are a testament to the power of knowledge. The rest of us can learn from their example and, ideally, avoid the trap that is the lottery.