![]() The earliest known version of keno dates to the Han dynasty and is said to have helped pay for the Great Wall of China. Often, though, lotteries were organized to raise money for public works. In many of these early instances, they were deployed either as a kind of party game-during Roman Saturnalias, tickets were distributed free to guests, some of whom won extravagant prizes-or as a means of divining God’s will. They were common in the Roman Empire-Nero was a fan of them make of that what you will-and are attested to throughout the Bible, where the casting of lots is used for everything from selecting the next king of Israel to choosing who will get to keep Jesus’ garments after the Crucifixion. The question that lurks within “For a Dollar and a Dream” is which category they really belong to-and, accordingly, whether governments charged with promoting the general welfare should be in the business of producing them, publicizing them, and profiting from them. ![]() “Americans spend more on lottery tickets every year than on cigarettes, coffee, or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “and they spend more on lottery tickets annually than on video streaming services, concert tickets, books, and movie tickets combined.”Īs those two sets of comparisons suggest, lottery tickets can seem like either a benign form of entertainment or a dangerous addiction. All of this, repeated every day at grocery stores and liquor stores and mini-marts across the country, renders the lottery a ninety-one-billion-dollar business. At my local store, some customers snap up entire rolls-at a minimum, three hundred dollars’ worth of tickets-and others show up in the morning, play until they win something, then come back in the evening and do it again. One in two American adults buys a lottery ticket at least once a year, one in four buys one at least once a month, and the most avid players buy them at rates that might shock you. On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players. At the heart of Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services. How this came to be is the subject of an excellent new book, “ For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” by the historian Jonathan D. Everywhere else, Blazing Hot Cash and its ilk are, like state parks and driver’s licenses, a government service. Only Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah are not in the business of selling lottery tickets. The strangest of the many strange things about these tickets is that, unlike other convenience-store staples-Utz potato chips, Entenmann’s cinnamon-swirl buns, $1.98 bottles of wine-they are brought to you by your state government. ![]() ![]() All this is before you get to the Pick 3, Pick 4, Powerball, and Mega Millions tickets, which are comparatively staid in appearance-they look like Scantron sheets-and are printed out at the time of purchase. If your taste runs toward Fast Ca$h or Red Ball Cash Doubler, you can buy one for just a buck if you prefer VIP Club or $2,000,000 Gold Rush, a single ticket will set you back thirty dollars. ![]() Some of them are named for other games, such as the Monopoly X5, the Double Blackjack, and the Family Feud, but most are straightforward about the point of buying them: Show Me $10,000!, $100,000 Lucky, Money Explosion, Cash Is King, Blazing Hot Cash, Big Cash Riches. When you are looking at a solid wall of them, they also resemble-based on the palette, font choices, and general flashy hecticness-the mid-nineties Internet. The dominant themes are primary colors, dollar signs, and shiny, as in gold bars, shooting stars, glinting horseshoes, and stacks of silver coins. To do so, you must be at least eighteen years old, even though the tickets look like the décor for a kindergarten classroom. At my local convenience store, and almost surely at yours, too, it is possible to buy upward of fifty different kinds of scratch-off lottery tickets. ![]()
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