For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America by Jonathan D. Cohen

Do you feel lucky? When Clint Eastwood asked this question on the big screen, a string of cash-strapped states were asking it of their residents, establishing the first publicly run lotteries in the United States in more than a century. Deindustrializing Northeastern states were under budgetary siege, caught between tax-resistant electorates and their own declining fortunes. They were fighting the mob and wanted to corner its winnings as well as its bosses. And they had ready customers; working-class Catholics fleeing to the suburbs were as eager to play the lottery as the Black urbanites they left behind. The states that pioneered this new wave of government gambling—New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts—were feeling lucky. Lotteries would make their day.They did not. Despite the many innovations to come—scratch-off tickets, growing jackpots, multi-state mega-prizes—lotteries did not rescue Northeastern states from tough choices in the 1970s, make up for property tax revolts in the West in the 1980s, or allow Southern states to revitalize cash-starved education systems in the 1990s. But they did become the biggest government-run business in the United States, with a staggering $45 billion revenue in 2020, surpassing even the profits of cigarettes or smartphones. In a society marked by growing inequality and insecurity, the product that lotteries offered was an increasingly improbable chance of increasingly astronomical riches.This little-known story is an ideal subject for interdisciplinary history, and Cohen seizes the opportunity. His slim book is deeply researched yet eminently readable, and it draws on political science, behavioral economics, public finance, cultural studies, and good old-fashioned political economy. Cohen is as comfortable citing Kahneman as he is Cowie, exploring popular images of wealth as trenchantly as he explicates religious ideals. He has also mined a remarkable number of archives. The only dimension that seems to be missing is the cross-national one; I could not help but wonder whether America’s lottery obsession is unique within the advanced industrial world and, if so, why.Cohen’s book has a straightforward structure, dividing the rise of state lotteries into three phases: their 1970s arrival, 1980s Western consolidation, and 1990s Southern expansion. For each, he pairs an archivally grounded history with a nuanced analysis of associated cultural and economic developments.Three sophisticated interdisciplinary claims are embedded in this simple approach. The first is that state lotteries are fundamentally the product of politics, driven by basic fiscal imperatives, elite-level jockeying, voter attitudes, and (particularly important) aggressive lobbying by the private lottery industry seeking lucrative contracts. Lotteries were established by politicians, and politicians could, in theory, dis-establish them.The second claim, which shifts the focus from politics to economics, is that the explosive growth of lotteries reflects the shifting contours of the American economy since the 1970s. Thus, lotteries went from offering middle-class stability in the 1970s—as one lottery executive put it in 1975, “we sell hope in a depressed economy”—to unimaginable riches in the increasingly unequal decades after (3). The growing sense that workers and families had to deal with economic challenges on their own (a transformation I have called “The Great Risk Shift”) encouraged a growing search for a ticket to upward mobility.Cohen’s final message is his most important: Those who think the United States should revive its long lottery-free era—and Cohen is unapologetically among them—need to listen to the Americans who buy all those tickets. Cohen’s research shows that lottery players are more likely to be low-income, non-white, male, and without a college degree. But he also situates their seemingly irrational bets within a broader context that encompasses not just wrenching economic shifts but also the uncomfortable fact that organs of the state are encouraging vulnerable citizens to make those bets. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Cohen asks us to consider why “tens of millions of Americans every single week … reason that their best hope for a new life lies in the luck of the draw” (207). In doing so, he makes a compelling case for an interdisciplinary approach not just to policy history but also to policy reform.