Lottery is a form of gambling in which numbers are drawn to determine a prize. The winnings may be a cash amount or goods. Most lotteries are organized by state governments or private corporations, but they can also be national or multi-state games. In addition, many lottery games are available online. The prize money can be a fixed sum, or it can be a percentage of total receipts, with the organizer bearing some risk if not enough tickets are sold.
Regardless of how they are structured, most lotteries involve a high degree of luck. The odds of winning are very low, and it is not uncommon for winners to go broke within a few years. Despite the low probability of winning, Americans spend over $80 billion on lotteries every year. Cohen argues that this obsession with unimaginable wealth is a symptom of a larger problem: the American Dream has become an elusive fantasy for the middle class, as incomes have stagnated, job security and pensions have disappeared, health-care costs are skyrocketing, and housing prices have increased while wages have remained the same.
Lottery grew in popularity as a way to fund public works and social services in early America, despite strong Protestant prohibitions against gambling. Its popularity can be explained partly by exigency: the colonies were short on revenue, but needed to finance everything from civil defense to church construction. Even the Continental Congress relied on lotteries to raise funds for the Revolutionary War. Early America was also defined politically by an aversion to taxation.
