The Lottery, Shirley Jackson’s short story, describes an annual event in a small village that has always been conducted. The locals are enthusiastic yet nervous, believing that the lottery will ensure a good harvest. They rely on an old proverb: “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.”

The distribution of property and slaves by lot has long history, with many instances in the Bible, although the use of lottery for material gain is of much more recent origin. The first public lottery to distribute prize money was organized by Augustus Caesar for municipal repairs in Rome, and later the Dutch state-owned Staatsloterij is the oldest continuing lottery in Europe (1726).

Among the first American public lotteries were private games wherein each application received the same chance of winning (the color in each cell indicates how many times that application was awarded that column’s position; a plot showing similar counts for each column suggests an unbiased outcome). In 1776 the Continental Congress used a lottery to raise funds to fight the Revolution. Privately organized lotteries became a popular method of raising money for many public projects and charities, including building Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, King’s College, Union, and other institutions. The lottery was widely considered to be a painless way of taxation.

Today’s lottery participants come mainly from the 21st through 60th percentile of income distribution, people with a couple dollars in their pockets for discretionary spending. These people play the lottery with clear eyes; they have quote unquote systems for buying tickets at certain stores, in certain times of day or at specific types of outlets, and they know that the odds are long.