When you buy a lottery ticket, you pay for the privilege of being given an extremely long shot at something. The prize money can range from cash to subsidized housing units or kindergarten placements. It can seem like a great thing, but the ugly underbelly of it is that it can give people a false sense of hope. In other words, it can make them feel as though winning, despite the odds, is their only chance of getting out from beneath their circumstances.
Lotteries are a popular form of gambling. States promote them as a way to raise revenue for public-service projects—and, indeed, they do raise quite a bit of dough. But the question of whether that’s worth the trade-off of people losing their hard-earned money is debatable.
The structure of a lottery is fairly simple: a person pays a small amount of money to enter a drawing that involves numbers, and then prizes are awarded depending on the number of matching tickets. There are several ways to play a lottery: You can choose your own numbers, and you can also let a machine randomly pick them for you. Most modern lottery games let you do both, and there’s a box or section on the playslip that lets you mark to indicate that you accept whatever set of numbers the computer picks for you.
Traditionally, lotteries operated much like traditional raffles, with players purchasing tickets for a draw that would occur weeks or even months in the future. But innovations since the 1970s have radically changed the industry. Now, lotteries often feature a mix of instant games that offer smaller prizes and lower odds of winning (typically in the 10s or 100s of dollars) and longer-term “draw” games with larger prizes but also higher odds.
In general, instant games generate the most initial revenue for a lottery. As time passes, however, the initial excitement wears off and revenues begin to decline. To keep their sales high, many state lotteries introduce new games and increase the odds on existing ones to lure in customers.
The short story by Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” is a disturbingly honest tale of the pitfalls of nationalist culture. It takes place on June 27th of an unspecified year in a bucolic small town, and begins with the narrator watching a crowd assemble for their yearly lottery. The children are the first to assemble—the stereotypical normalcy of small-town life—and then the adults start coming.
The narrator watches them all go through the ritual, and she can’t help but notice how many of these men are wearing army fatigues. The story is a clear warning against embracing an invented sense of nationalism, and its power comes from the refusal to be specific about setting. The setting isn’t a coincidence; it’s a stinging indictment of the human cost of believing in a mythical America.