A lottery is an organized drawing of numbers for a prize, such as cash or goods. The term is also used to describe the process of selecting people for limited-access jobs or opportunities, such as a place in kindergarten, a spot in a subsidized housing unit, or an experimental vaccine. The casting of lots has a long history in human society for making decisions and determining fates, although the lottery as an organized activity for material gain is more recent, dating back only to ancient Rome and 1466 in Bruges, Belgium.
While the basic elements of lotteries may differ from one country to another, they usually consist of some means of recording identities and amounts staked by bettors and a method of choosing winners. The latter may be as simple as a random selection from a pool of names and amounts or as complex as an electronic system that combines a computer with a random number generator to select participants and allocate prizes. A bettor’s identity and the numbers or other symbols selected by him or her are recorded on a ticket that is deposited with the lottery organization for subsequent shuffling and selection. A bettor may write his name on the ticket, or may purchase a numbered receipt that will be inserted into the pool of tickets for later determination of whether the receipt was among those chosen as winners.
Some states have monopolies over state-sponsored lotteries; others contract out their management to private firms. The overall structure and evolution of state lotteries tend to follow remarkably similar patterns: the initial arguments for and against adoption; the choice of a public agency or corporation to run the lottery; the start of operations with a modest number of relatively simple games; and a steady, albeit gradual, expansion in both the range of games offered and the sophistication of their management.
Lottery critics argue that this expansion, combined with a government monopoly and continuous pressure for additional revenues, can result in the lottery becoming a form of extortion, promote addictive gambling behavior, or both. Others contend that a state’s desire for revenue must be balanced against its responsibility to protect the public welfare.
Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” is a depiction of the hypocrisy and evil nature of ordinary human beings. This is seen as the reason why this story has become so well-known and popular. Its details of contemporary small-town American life are embroidered with the underlying theme of humanity’s iniquity. Its main characters, Mr. Summers and Mr. Graves, are shown as being in a state of hypocrisy and iniquity, even though this act had been an annual practice in their village for years. It is because of the’simpleness’ and ‘ordinaryness’ of this act that its iniquity and evil nature are revealed. As a result, the readers are left with a feeling of disgust and repugnance towards these characters. Despite all of this, the readers continue to enjoy reading this short story.