A lottery is a game in which numbers are drawn and prizes awarded, either for money or for other goods. It is common in sports, where teams are selected by lottery, and it is also used to allocate everything from subsidized housing units to kindergarten placements. In the seventeenth century, lotteries were a common method of collecting taxes and raising funds for public usages. The Dutch state-owned Staatsloterij is the oldest still running one.
In this story, a group of villagers gather in a field to draw their lottery slips. They chat and share bits of gossip. Some of them mention that other communities have stopped their own lottery. An old man, who seems to be the village patriarch, cites a traditional rhyme that goes “Lottery in June/Corn will be heavy soon.”
The earliest lotteries were simply the casting of lots, a practice dating back at least as far as ancient Rome (Nero was an avid patron), the Bible, and various other cultures. In modern times, a lottery consists of buying a ticket and selecting numbers or symbols that are then recorded, shuffled, and spit out by machines in a random fashion. Winners are determined by the number or symbol that matches those drawn by the machine.
Those who promote state-run lotteries argue that they are a relatively painless source of revenue, in that the players voluntarily spend their money for the benefit of society. But this argument fails to take into account the fact that the lottery has coincided with a decline in financial security for most working Americans. Starting in the nineteen-seventies and accelerating in the nineteen-eighties, income inequality widened, pensions eroded, health-care costs increased, and the longstanding national promise that hard work would yield a secure middle class life ceased to be true for most of America.