Many people will buy a lottery ticket this year, making it America’s most popular form of gambling. It’s a fixture of society, a source of state revenue, and a form of entertainment. But is it fair? State lotteries are run as businesses that rely on advertising. That means that they try to maximize revenues, which has its own set of problems for the poor, problem gamblers, etc. The question is whether the public benefits from these efforts outweigh the costs.

Lottery revenues often grow rapidly in the first years after a state starts a game, but then level off or even decline. The reason is that after a while the public becomes bored with the games on offer. In response, the lottery introduces new games and increases promotional efforts, including advertising. Critics point to a variety of problems with the way that lottery advertising is conducted, including misleading claims about the odds of winning; inflating the value of money won (lotto jackpots are paid out over 20 years, which makes them subject to inflation and taxes that dramatically erode the actual payout); and generally misrepresenting the overall costs of lotteries.

The early days of modern lotteries began in 15th-century Burgundy and Flanders, where towns held public lotteries to raise money for town fortifications and to help the needy. Benjamin Franklin sponsored a lottery to raise funds for cannons to defend Philadelphia during the American Revolution, and Thomas Jefferson tried to use a private lottery to pay off his crushing debts.