Lottery is gambling for the masses, and the more people buy tickets, the bigger the jackpots. The odds of winning are vanishingly slim, but many people play anyway. Cohen tries to understand this behavior, and why it matters.

The first state-run lottery was established in New Hampshire in 1964, and grew rapidly in the Northeast and Rust Belt. State governments were in dire need of money to maintain their services, but didn’t want to raise taxes. The lottery seemed like a magic bullet: it could generate hundreds of millions of dollars, enough to solve any fiscal crisis. State politicians could then use that cash to provide everything from public parks to teacher salaries, without enraging an antitax electorate.

In the early days, a lottery consisted of a pool or collection of tickets or their counterfoils from which winning numbers were extracted. Today, computer programs mix up the numbers and symbols on each ticket to create a random selection of winners. Then the tickets are reshuffled, and the process repeats.

The nineteen-seventies and eighties saw a steady decline in financial security for working people. Pensions eroded, job security vanished, health-care costs increased, and the American dream that one day you’d be better off than your parents ceased to seem plausible for most people. The lottery offered the promise of unimaginable wealth, and it was a magnet for people who otherwise wouldn’t gamble. But that was never a sustainable strategy. When the odds of winning got worse, lottery advocates switched tactics. They stopped arguing that the lottery would float all of a state’s budget and started promoting specific line items—usually education, but sometimes elder care or public parks, or even aid for veterans—that they knew voters were already supportive of.