Lottery is a competition in which numbered tickets or tokens are sold for a chance to win prizes based on a random drawing. A lottery may be run by state or private organizations. It must have a pool or collection of tickets and counterfoils, a method for selecting winners, and a procedure for determining the winning numbers or symbols. Computers are frequently used for these tasks. Prizes may be cash or goods, or, as is common in sports and some games, a number of small prizes that are wagered again in subsequent drawings.
In the Low Countries in the 15th century, public lotteries were held to raise money for town fortifications and to help the poor. These were the first recorded lotteries.
The reason people buy tickets, even if they don’t win, isn’t just the money: it’s time, a few minutes, hours, days, to dream and imagine the win. For the very poor, people in the bottom quintile of income distribution who don’t have much discretionary money to spend, it can be a way to hope for a better life, however irrational and mathematically impossible that hope is.
Lotteries are popular with some states as a way to raise money. In the immediate post-World War II period, they allowed states to expand their services without raising taxes, but that arrangement began to break down in the 1960s as the cost of running a large state grew. In the past 20 years, lotteries have raised about $502 billion, but they still amount to only a fraction of total state revenue.