The lottery is the most popular form of gambling in America. Americans spend over $80 billion a year on tickets. That is over $600 per household. We should be using this money to build emergency funds and pay off credit card debt instead.

Lotteries are a form of gambling where people try to win a prize by matching numbers drawn randomly. The prizes are usually cash or goods. They have been around since ancient times. In the Bible, the casting of lots for decisions is documented. In Roman times, lottery games were common as a way to determine things like who would receive the right to hold a temple or the most expensive dinner guest. These early lotteries were also used to distribute charitable gifts.

For politicians looking for a way to maintain existing services without raising taxes, lottery funding seemed perfect. In the immediate post-World War II period, states were growing their social safety nets and needed money to fund them. But they didn’t want to raise taxes on the middle and working classes. So they created lotteries that made revenue appear out of thin air. Lottery money was a sort of budgetary miracle, writes Cohen.

Those who play the lottery are aware of the odds, and they know that for the big jackpots, the chances of winning are incredibly long. But they keep playing because of a combination of these two factors: an inextricable human urge to gamble, and the sense that the lottery is their last or best chance at a better life. Some of them even have these quote-unquote systems, that are not borne out by statistical reasoning, about lucky numbers and stores and times of day and types of tickets to buy.

In the 18th century, public lotteries became widely used in England and America. They raised money for everything from paving streets to building colleges. Benjamin Franklin, for example, sponsored a lottery to help finance cannons for the defense of Philadelphia against the British. Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, tried to hold a private lottery to ease his crushing debts.

These early public lotteries were sometimes abused by fraudsters, but a century later they came to be trusted as a means of financing projects. In the 19th century, they were used to construct buildings at Harvard and Yale. George Washington even sponsored a lottery in 1768 to build a road across the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Today, state governments still operate a lottery. The prizes may be a little different—from cars and boats to education grants for college students. But the basic idea remains the same: A governmental agency will sell tickets to the general public, with the proceeds going toward a specific project.

It is important to understand the role of lotteries in modern society, but it is equally vital to recognize that there are some fundamental issues with how they work and how people respond to them. Despite their many flaws, they are popular and continue to be used in many countries.