The lottery is a game where you bet money on numbers that are drawn for a prize. Each player chooses a set of numbers, or opts for a “quick pick” and lets the lottery retailer select a set of random numbers for them. Every time someone plays, the jackpot grows until it’s won. Then the jackpot rolls over to the next drawing and the cycle starts again.

Whether it’s the Mega Millions or Powerball jackpot, people know that they have a really slim chance of winning, but there is a small sliver of hope that they will one day become rich. The lottery is all about dangling the possibility of instant wealth in an age of inequality and limited social mobility.

Lottery is not completely fair, of course, but there’s a reason why it works. There’s a certain inextricable human impulse to gamble, and the lottery is all about capturing it and encouraging more gambling.

It’s also about a state need for revenue, and the belief that gambling is inevitable, so you might as well tax it for public service. And finally, there’s the fact that jackpots are designed to grow to apparently newsworthy levels to drive sales and encourage more play. But most of that money goes to commissions for the lottery retailers and the overhead for the lottery system itself, with only about 40% going to the actual winners. And even that’s divided up into multiple streams of income, including fees for the lottery retailer and state taxes on the winning tickets.