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Throughout history, governments have used the lottery to generate funds for a variety of public purposes, from building and repairing roads to subsidizing a city’s police force or helping the poor buy bread. In the modern era, however, politicians began using the lottery as a substitute for taxes, promising that its proceeds would fund a generous social safety net without provoking voters’ notorious antipathy to tax increases.

According to Cohen, state lotteries started popping up around the country in the nineteen-sixties as states searched for ways to keep services afloat without hiking taxes. They were also increasingly aware of the vast amounts of money that could be made in the gambling industry and envious of casinos’ huge profits, which they thought state coffers might be able to match.

But critics of the lottery questioned both the ethics of funding public services through gambling and how much money the government actually stood to gain. These critics hailed from all sides of the political spectrum, but the most vociferous were devout Protestants who viewed government-sanctioned lotteries as morally unconscionable. Moreover, critics argued that the lottery’s success was largely due to market forces, with sales increasing when incomes drop and unemployment rises. They also pointed out that, like other commercial products, lottery advertising was most heavily promoted in neighborhoods that were disproportionately poor, black or Hispanic.

In a bid to overcome these objections, lottery officials ran high-profile campaigns that inflated the impact of lotteries on state budgets. For example, in California, which introduced its first state lottery in 1978, the campaign boasted that the resulting revenues would cover about five per cent of its education budget. But, as Cohen explains, such claims are misleading: On average, lottery revenue makes up only about one per cent of state budgets.

By the end of the twentieth century, most states had adopted their own version of the lottery. Some had even partnered with each other to increase jackpots and attract more players, creating multi-state games like Powerball. In many cases, these schemes were popular enough to help states avoid raising taxes and maintaining their social safety nets. But, as a recent report from the National Council on Responsible Gambling (NCRG) has found, lottery revenue is not enough to sustain those services indefinitely, and the long-term costs are mounting. Rather than allowing the lottery to replace needed taxes, NCRG recommends that lawmakers begin relying on a range of alternative revenue sources.