A lottery is a way for governments to raise money by selling tickets with numbers on them. If your number is drawn, you win a prize, usually a large sum of cash. People have been playing lotteries for centuries. The first European lotteries were held during the Roman Empire. The prizes were often fancy items such as dinnerware, but the modern lottery is a pure money game. In colonial America, lotteries were used to fund roads, canals, colleges, libraries, churches, and other public projects.

The big message that state lotteries are promoting is that the money they raise for the state is important and should be viewed as a civic duty. But the amount of money that is raised by lotteries relative to overall state revenue is quite small. And the fact that people spend billions of dollars on lottery tickets means that many people are foregoing other low-risk investments, like investing in their retirement or college tuition.

Lotteries have been around for a long time, and there is something to be said for the idea that gambling is inevitable, and that states should just offer lotteries so that they can make money off of people’s inexorable desire to gamble. But there is also a problem with dangling the promise of instant riches in an age of inequality and limited social mobility. It is not enough to just raise money, you need to decide how you’re going to spend it.