Lottery is a game in which people pay for a ticket and then try to win prizes by matching a series of numbers that are randomly spit out by machines. The first lottery was recorded in China during the Han dynasty between 205 and 187 BC. Today, there are many different types of lotteries, including those that award housing units in a subsidized development or kindergarten placements at a prestigious public school. Some of the proceeds are donated to local charities and used for general state funding.

The odds of winning a lottery can be very slim, but the money does not come cheap, and there are often costs that can eat into it over time. This has resulted in a number of cases where lottery winners find themselves much poorer than before. The problem, writes Cohen, is that the lottery’s marketing tries to sell its product as a painless form of taxation or as a fun way to spend one’s leisure time. It overlooks the fact that, for many people, playing the lottery is neither.

Most players are not playing the lottery for the pure joy of it; they’re doing so to make a profit or to try and break even. It’s no surprise, then, that lottery sales have climbed as incomes fall and unemployment rises. It also doesn’t surprise that lottery advertising is most heavily targeted in neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, Latino, or poor. Lottery officials and defenders like to say that winning the lottery is a matter of luck, but it’s a much more complicated story than that.