In a world where money is tight, lottery play offers a moment to dream, an opportunity to imagine that the long shot will turn into the improbable. For some people, especially those who don’t see much hope for themselves in the economy, it can be worth the price of a ticket to hold on to that irrational and mathematically impossible hope.

Cohen traces the lottery’s rise in parallel with a decline in the financial security of the average American family. During the nineteen-seventies and eighties, the wealth gap widened, job security declined, pensions eroded, health-care costs went up, and a long-standing national promise that hard work and education would guarantee future prosperity faded. The obsession with improbable wealth, including the lottery’s promise of winning millions of dollars, seemed a logical outgrowth of these dismal trends.

Those who championed legalization argued that a state could run a lottery to generate enormous sums of money and float any budgetary shortfalls, relieving politicians from having to raise taxes. When it became clear that this strategy had its limits, many advocates began arguing instead that lottery profits could fund a single line item in the budget—invariably some sort of public service, such as education, elder care, or parks.

The resulting popularity of the lottery grew as it became possible to buy tickets online and by phone, and more people joined syndicates to reduce their expenses and increase the chance of winning. The lure of the jackpot has also accelerated, as commissioners raised prize caps and added more numbers to the pool. The result is a game in which the odds of winning plummet but the prizes soar.