The Ugly Underbelly of the Lottery

When you play the lottery, you’re not just risking your money. You’re risking your life, as well. The harrowing scene from the movie “The Lottery,” in which a woman is randomly selected and killed by her neighbors, illustrates the ugly underbelly of this gamble: the sense that whatever you’re doing at any given moment could be your last one, that there might be something worse than losing a lottery ticket—that you might end up losing everything.

Lotteries date back to ancient times—Nero was a fan—and are attested to throughout the Bible. It was not uncommon, for instance, in the Low Countries to hold a lottery when raising funds for town fortifications or to help the poor. These early lotteries were fun pastimes and a sort of divining practice, but they also functioned as a painless form of taxation.

In the modern era, Cohen argues, lotteries became popular in the Northeast and the Rust Belt when state governments began running deficits amid swelling populations, rising inflation, and the costs of the Vietnam War. State officials hoped that lotteries would provide a steady stream of revenue to replace the need to raise taxes or cut services, both of which were highly unpopular with voters.

But the lotteries didn’t work out as planned. It was not just that the average person did not find one-in-three million odds very compelling; they found them even less so as prizes rose and jackpots got bigger, making it harder for anyone to win. And so, as the glitz of the lottery grew, people began spending an ever-larger percentage of their income on tickets.