How The Lottery Continues to Get A Hold Of People
Winning the lottery is, for many people, the ultimate gambling goal. While other forms of betting have their own pitfalls – think of analysing enough horse racing form successfully, or choosing the right online poker site with the right online poker tournament that will give you the key to success – there is a kind of beauty around winning big by just picking some numbers. But why do lotteries continue to grab people’s attention? Here, we will look at the history of lotteries and just why they get large chunks of the population excited.
Lotteries Through The Ages
When it comes to talking about lotteries and the grip they hold over the popular imagination, let’s go back to look at lotteries throughout history. As far back as the year 200 BC, lotteries were taking place in China, with the money going towards infrastructure projects. When work started on the precursor to the Great Wall of China, that would have been funded through lottery money. A couple of centuries after that, the Roman Empire was in full swing. With the Ancient Romans being a group of people who loved gambling, it was inevitable that lotteries would be a part of their lives. Upper-class dinner parties were often marked by a lottery where guests would receive tickets and get random prizes. On a larger scale, the emperor Augustus held a lottery to pay for repairs to Rome. Meanwhile, Elagabalus, who reigned from 218 to 222, created a public lottery. While some players could win big prizes – such as a slave, or a villa – there were also booby prizes, including dead animals and death sentences. The emperor had tickets fired out of catapults, which often caused stampedes, and the ticket launches also featured snakes.
It is, then, perhaps little wonder that Elagabalus was killed by his own guard after just four years ruling Rome.
Anyway, come the 15th century, lotteries started popping up in what are now the Netherlands and Belgium. In the town of Sluis, records show that a 1443 lottery sold 4,304 tickets and raised 1,737 florins, worth the equivalent of $284,000 today, to generate funds for town fortifications. Moving southwards a little, cities in what is now Italy were also quick to get in on things, with January 9 1449 being the day that a lottery was held in Milan to help fund a war with Venice. It was in the port of Genoa, however, that lottery fever really took hold. The city’s Great Council was picked twice a year at random, and people would bet on who would be called up. With people wanting to gamble more than twice a year, numbers were substituted for people in the same process. As you have probably already realised, this meant that 15th century Genoa had something a lot like the lotteries we know today.
In the 16th century, both England and France had lotteries, while 1726 saw the introduction of the Dutch Staatsloterij, which is the longest continually running lottery game in the world, beating Spain’s Christmas lottery, introduced in 1812, by nearly a century.
So, it’s clear that lotteries have always attracted interest, but what has kept their popularity up?
Permission To Dream
If politics is the art of the possible, then the lottery is all about what can be possible. Everybody likes to dream, and the lottery allows you to dream as big as you can. The idea of what could happen is a key trigger for people, even if the likelihood of winning the lottery is pretty small. Lauren Foster of the CFA Institute says that people who buy lottery tickets are “buying a very small dose of hope”, which seems like a good description of the process. Although everyone playing knows their chances of winning are pretty small, a dollar or two seems like a fair price to buy into the possibility of dreaming.
Dopamine Hits
There are physical, as well as psychological, reasons for this to be the case. Anticipation triggers dopamine, the chemical that’s linked with rewards, in the brain. This, in turn, means that it is fun to just buy a lottery ticket. What is also fun is being able to talk about your hopes. Pretty much everyone has had a conversation about what they would do if they were to win the lottery. It’s a fantasy that is socially acceptable to talk about, and that makes a big difference. And, talking of fantasies, buying a ticket lets you take a step, even if it is ultimately very small, towards making your fantasy a reality.
Private And Public Experiences
In the pre-streaming era, something that made television unique was that it was an experience that was both personal – you watched something at home, either by yourself or with your family – and universal – if everyone was watching the same programs, then you all had the same experience. In a way, playing the lottery performs a similar function. Everyone has their own individual dream of what they would do with the money, but lots of people play. This means that the lottery becomes a kind of shared experience throughout the world.
Bringing People Together
Not only is the experience of playing the lottery a shared one, but sometimes the very tickets that offer a gateway to a world of wealth can be split between people. Friends, families, and co-workers often team up to form a syndicate, pooling their cash together to buy tickets and sharing the winnings between them. Sometimes, the victory becomes something of a shared one. For example, a group of 16 municipal workers from Ocean County, New Jersey, all became nearly $4 million richer in 2013 when their ticket won a third of the US Powerball lottery’s $448 million jackpot.
All in all, lotteries have been part of human history since ancient times. But whether it’s people in early China looking to garner riches or contemporary Americans seeking life changing riches, the power of dreams has helped make playing the lottery something that generations of people have loved, love, and will continue to love long into the future.
