Lottery mania, or why we love games of chance
By Jay MacDonald • Bankrate.com

The next time you hand over a buck for a Powerball ticket, thank the man on the bill for your chance to retire in style.

If George Washington hadn't been a lotto fan, you might still be waking to tea and crumpets for breakfast. Proceeds from a colonial lottery helped Washington cross the Delaware, defeat the redcoats and make the New World safe for all us convenience-store dreamers.

According to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries, players in the 38 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia spent $42.4 billion on lottery tickets in fiscal year 2002, an average of $168 per capita and a 9 percent increase over the previous year.

That's a lotta lotto, especially considering our minuscule odds of winning: approximately 1 in 76 million for the 10-state Big Game, 1 in 80 million for 24-state Powerball.

"Put in perspective, if you buy 50 Big Game tickets a week, you'll win the jackpot on average once every 30,000 years," says Michael Orkin, statistics professor at Cal State-Hayward and author of What Are The Odds: Chance in Everyday Life.

Hope springs eternal
Ah, but we can hope. Whether we're registering for a sweepstakes or ponying up for a fistful of fate-busters, Americans love the prospect of winning something for practically nothing.

"It's a dollar and a dream," says Bob Vincent, spokesman for GTech, which provides the processing for lotteries in 86 jurisdictions worldwide, including 26 U.S. states. "For a dollar investment, you walk around for a day thinking, 'Gee, what would I do with those millions of dollars?' That's the entertainment value."

Games of chance have been used to sell us everything from the mundane (magazine subscriptions) to the out-of-this-world (Russians can vie for a stay on the Mir space station). They have financed the building of roads, bridges, hospitals and defense of the realm. They have raised billions for worthy causes and rankled the righteous as a soft form of gambling that preys on the poor.

Love 'em or loathe 'em, lotteries and sweepstakes continue to draw us in with this single, irrefutable certainty: Sooner or later, someone always wins.

Lotteries vs. sweepstakes
Although they are often accompanied by the same hyped-up audio-visual razzle-dazzle, sweepstakes and lotteries are decidedly different animals.

Sweepstakes are advertising or promotional devices in which items of value (cash, cars, vacation packages) are awarded to participants via a drawing. No purchase or entry fee is required.

A sweepstakes's aim is to capture your attention with the free chance to win in order to sell you the sponsor's product. Subsequent sales increases usually more than cover the cost of the prizes. The most famous example is magazine subscriptions: Everyone knows Publishers Clearing House.

An online search reveals the sheer ubiquity of sweepstakes. Just the first of more than 396,000 response pages features links to sweepstakes sponsored by Nabisco, Bank of America, Lay's, Realty World, Howard Johnson, Coleman and the Long Island nonprofit North Shore Animal League.

Lotteries, by contrast, require a fee or payment to enter. The $1 lotto ticket is most common in the United States. In addition to bankrolling the jackpot, proceeds from sales of lottery tickets go toward the cost of administering and regulating the game and often to a social or charitable cause, as well.

Confusion between sweepstakes and lotteries is understandable. The old Irish Sweepstakes, for example, was actually a lottery; it was renamed in 1988. The Vietnam War draft lottery was in fact a sweepstakes, albeit one that few young men of the day aspired to win.

Moses and the Powerball
While sweepstakes are a relatively modern phenomenon, lotteries have been around for centuries.

According to Gerald Willmann, economics professor at the University of Kiel, Germany, decision-making by chance was an ancient way to allocate property rights, assign unpopular jobs and settle legal disputes. The word lottery itself derives from the old German word hleut, meaning part of a whole to be distributed, he notes.

In the Bible, Moses uses a lottery system to award tracts of land to his people. Lotteries also were a popular way to raise money to finance wars and pay for major public works projects. The Great Wall of China was built in part by proceeds from an ancient Keno game.