A lottery is a game in which participants pay a small sum of money (a ticket) to win prizes determined by random chance. Prizes may be money or goods or services. Lottery games have been popular in many societies for centuries and are still played today. In modern times, the term is also used for other types of decisions based on chance—for example, allocations of units in a subsidized housing block or kindergarten placements at a public school.

In the sixteenth century, lottery games became widespread in the Low Countries as a means of raising funds for town fortifications and helping the poor. Lottery tickets could be purchased for ten shillings, and winners were exempt from criminal prosecution. In early America, lotteries were often tangled up with slavery—George Washington once managed a lottery whose prizes included human beings, and one of the first slave rebellions was fomented by Denmark Vesey, who won a lottery in South Carolina and then used his winnings to buy his freedom.

The odds of winning the average lottery ticket are a million to one. Yet people continue to spend their hard-earned cash on tickets, and dream of becoming the next big winner. It is not that they are irrational or don’t understand the math; rather, they have come to believe that the lottery offers their last, best, or only hope at a better life. And they have been deceived.