A lottery is a competition where prizes are allocated by a process that relies solely on chance. Prizes can be anything from a small cash prize to a large prize such as an apartment or a car. The rules for lotteries vary but they usually involve paying a fixed price to enter, drawing numbers and winning a prize. A lottery is often run by a government or government agency and there are some rules that need to be followed. The winner of a lottery must be over eighteen and the ticket must have been purchased within the last two weeks of the draw.

Politicians looking for a way to avoid raising taxes faced an angry electorate in the late-twentieth century, and lottery advocates touted their games as “budgetary miracles, allowing states to appear seemingly magically out of thin air with hundreds of millions of dollars.” The result was that even states with low sales or income taxes instituted them, and even those with no taxes adopted them.

Lottery spending is responsive to economic changes, Cohen writes, and sales increase as incomes fall, unemployment rises, and poverty rates climb. Lottery products are most heavily advertised in neighborhoods that are disproportionately poor, Black, or Latino. And while rich people do play the lottery (one couple won $27 million over nine years by bulk-buying tickets thousands at a time), they spend far less of their income on it than do people who make less than fifty thousand dollars per year.