Whole lotto love why Americans play Powerball.

• Author: Peters, Justin
• Position: ON POLITICAL BOOKS - The Lottery Wars: Long Odds, Fast Money, and the Battle Over an American Institution - Book review

The Lottery Wars: Long Odds, Fast Money, and the Battle Over an American Institution

by Matthew Sweeney

Bloomsbury, 304 pp.

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The good songs are never the ones that get stuck in your head. It's always the stuff that you'd rather forget, like playground chants, or the Macarena. Take, for example, the Illinois Lottery jingle that has been playing in my brain for the past fifteen years. The tune was memorable both for its infectious samba beat and for using the word lotto as a verb. To lotto didn't just mean to win--it meant to win in a spectacularly public, sybaritic fashion. "Somebody's going to lotto, dancing to dreams come true," the singer promised. "Somebody's going to lotto--might as well be you."

I kept thinking of this jingle, and its promise that only six little numbers stood between you and "the good life," as I read The Lottery Wars: Long Odds, Fast Money, and the Battle Over an American Institution, Matthew Sweeney's omnibus history of the lottery in America. Today, lotteries are a multibillion-dollar industry, operational in forty-two states and the District of Columbia, encompassing everything from immense Powerball jackpots to low-stakes scratch games with names like Cash Blast and $1,000 Jumbo Bucks. Although Sweeney's book never quite lives up to its advance billing (the "wars" amount to little more than disputes that could erupt over any contentious policy matter), it is nevertheless a well-researched account of an all-American pastime.

The first lotteries were essentially raffles, sponsored by states, or towns, or schools--any civic institution facing a budget shortfall. The games were immensely popular, which makes sense--Americans have never been averse to gambling on long-shot propositions. Advocating for the formation of a New Jersey lottery in 1793, Alexander Hamilton was clearly talking about the speculative spirit that birthed the nation when he wrote, "Hope is apt to supply the place of probability--and the Imagination to be struck with glittering though precarious prospects."

For a time, the same imagination that birthed America paid for its construction. Lotteries helped the Virginia Company support its struggling colony in Jamestown back in the seventeenth century. Lottery profits benefited the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and contributed to the construction of countless roads, schools, and other public works after independence. Even Harvard and Yale owe their provenance in...