The lottery is a game of chance that involves drawing numbers to win a prize. It is one of the most popular forms of gambling and is played by many people worldwide. The first lotteries were organized in the seventeenth century, and they were used to raise funds for a variety of public purposes including canals, roads, churches, and even colleges. The lottery became very popular and was considered to be a painless form of taxation. The earliest lotteries were organized in Europe by towns and cities to raise money to help poor citizens or for wars. The modern form of the lottery was created in 1826 and has been a huge success. It is a great source of revenue for many states.
In Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, she portrays the people of a small town participating in their annual lottery tradition. Everyone is eager to see what happens but the outcome of the event does not satisfy anyone. Jackson suggests that humans have a sinister side to their nature which is shown through their participation in the lottery.
While lottery enthusiasts argue that the odds of winning are not so low as to make the game unattractive, they fail to consider how the lottery undermines the concept of fairness. The idea of fairness in a society is essential to its function and integrity. Moreover, the fact that it is not possible to determine who has the most merit or has been the most deserving of a prize shows that it is not truly a fair game. Despite these issues, there are a number of ways to make a lottery more fair.
The most common way to make a lottery more fair is to introduce a cap on prize amounts. This limit would prevent a single individual from winning an excessive amount of money in a very short period of time. This will prevent the lottery from becoming a form of financial ruin for those who are not wealthy.
Another way to make a lottery fairer is to eliminate or reduce the entry fees. This will make it easier for the average person to participate and increase its popularity. In addition, a lottery should be based on the principle of equal opportunity for all participants.
In the immediate post-World War II period, when lotteries took hold in America, they were hailed as “budgetary miracles.” Cohen observes that state politicians viewed them as a way to maintain existing services without raising taxes, thus satisfying voters’ aversion to taxes. For example, New Jersey had no income or sales tax, and the state legislature figured that the lottery could generate hundreds of millions of dollars, thereby relieving the state of the need to ever impose either of them. This naive assumption was flawed. As the economy deteriorated during the nineteen-seventies and accelerated into the nineteen-eighties, many Americans’ financial security eroded. They lost their pensions, the gap between rich and poor widened, health-care costs rose, and our long-standing national promise that education and hard work would render them better off than their parents essentially broke down.
