The lottery is a popular form of gambling in which people pay a small sum of money to win a prize determined by a random drawing. States and private companies run lotteries, which can involve scratch-off games, daily games or games with a fixed number of numbers. In the United States, state-regulated lotteries are common, with most offering a choice of cash or annuity payments. People spend upwards of $100 billion on lottery tickets every year. State-regulated lotteries allow winners to choose between receiving the prize amount spread out in annual payments over 30 years (known as the annuity option) or a lump sum of the total amount after taxes and fees (the cash option).
The odds of winning the lottery are extremely slim. But there is a certain inextricable human impulse that drives people to play. “People feel like it’s a kind of civic duty to play,” says Fern Kazlow, a clinical psychotherapist. “People who play regularly diminish their losses and concentrate on the times they’ve won, and that keeps them coming back.”
State-regulated lotteries rely on two main messages to attract players. The first is that the money that is generated from these games benefits a broader state budget. The second is that the games are necessary in order to capture an inevitable amount of gambling revenue. Those aren’t necessarily wrong messages, but they obscure the truth about how much these games cost people. They also obscure the real-world consequences of those costs, and whether they are worth it.