The Lottery Is a Public Policy Phenomenon

Lottery is the biggest form of gambling in the world, and it’s one of those public policy phenomena that’s really hard to wrap your head around. You buy a ticket, and then someone else randomly picks the numbers out of a hat or a machine, and whoever gets the winning combination wins the prize. It’s a classic example of public policy that evolves in pieces rather than as a whole, and it often creates special constituencies for itself, such as convenience store owners (the lottery is usually sold at gas stations) or lottery suppliers; teachers (in states where the revenue is earmarked for education); and state legislators who quickly grow accustomed to the extra revenue.

But, even if there are no problems of this sort, the fact that the lottery is run as a business that has to maximize its revenues means that its advertising necessarily focuses on persuading specific groups to spend their money on the tickets. That makes the whole enterprise a kind of marketing exercise, and there are critics who argue that it’s at cross-purposes with the general public interest in ways that aren’t always immediately apparent.

Then there are those who try to make the most of their lottery tickets by following “quote unquote systems that don’t necessarily stand up to statistical reasoning,” like purchasing their children’s ages or birthdays so that, in theory, they will have an advantage when the numbers are chosen at random. But Harvard statistics professor Mark Glickman says that’s not the right way to go about it.