Lottery is an arrangement in which prizes are allocated by chance, usually to pay for something that is either limited or high in demand. Examples include a lottery for kindergarten placements at a reputable school or a lottery to occupy units in a subsidized housing block. It is also common for governments to organize lotteries in order to raise money for a variety of projects. The most familiar type of lottery involves paying a small amount of money to purchase a ticket with numbers that are randomly spit out by machines. The participants win prizes if enough of their tickets match the numbers that are randomly chosen by the machine.

Many people play the lottery, and they do so in large part because of their inherent desire to gamble. There is a certain inextricable human impulse to try to improve your odds through skill, and there are plenty of stories of winners who have done worse than they would have on their own.

But there are other reasons that lottery plays are a regressive form of gambling. It’s not just that people in the bottom quintile spend a bigger fraction of their income on tickets, it is that these people have very little discretionary income to spend in the first place. In an age of inequality and low social mobility, the lottery can feel like a last-ditch hope for a new start. The anecdotes of lottery winners who go broke or into mental health trouble suggest that this isn’t always a good idea.