The Popularity of the Lottery
The lottery is a popular form of gambling in which people pay for tickets that contain numbers or symbols. They win prizes if the numbers or symbols match those randomly selected by machines. The most common prize is cash, though there are also other goods such as free college tuition or units in a subsidized housing project. Most lotteries are state-run, but there is a significant global market for commercial lotteries.
The basic elements of a lottery are a method for collecting and pooling the money staked by each bettor, and a procedure for selecting the winning numbers or symbols. The process may involve a simple shuffling of tickets, as with a deck of cards or a bag of marbles, or more complex methods such as a computer-generated random selection. The latter methods have the advantage of allowing bettors to know whether or not they are among the winners before they see the results of the drawing.
Despite the fact that they are based on pure chance, lotteries have consistently won broad public approval and have not been abolished or repealed by any state. They continue to draw millions of dollars in annual revenue from a player base that is disproportionately low-income, less educated, nonwhite, and male. The majority of players purchase one ticket a week and play the lottery several times per year, while many others are less frequent or casual players. The lottery’s popularity is largely unrelated to a state’s actual financial health, as evidenced by the fact that it has been embraced even in states with high tax rates and large budget surpluses.
A key factor in sustaining lottery popularity is that its proceeds are viewed as benefiting a specific public good, such as education. This argument is especially effective when a state’s fiscal situation is precarious and it faces the prospect of raising taxes or making cuts in public programs. But it is also the basis for much of the promotion and advertising undertaken by state lotteries, which frequently feature images of schools or other public institutions as part of the lottery’s image.
In The Lottery, Shirley Jackson depicts a small town’s obsession with the lottery. She begins her story with the statement that “The children assembled first, of course.” Her use of this phrase is meant to suggest that the villagers do not question or doubt their participation in the lottery; they are simply going through the motions. Nevertheless, this sequence of events points to the fact that these villagers are weak and easily manipulated. The fact that they focus on the surface – slips of paper – is a metaphor for their fragility.