The lottery is a fixture in modern life, but it may not be as harmless as it seems. People spend billions each year playing the game, and while some are able to use their winnings wisely, it can have major financial consequences for others. Lottery is not without its critics, who argue that it is a form of gambling and that those with low incomes make up a disproportionate share of players, and that the odds of winning are very poor.
But there’s something else to consider: the cost of the lottery to taxpayers. States promote these games as ways to raise revenue, but the reality is that they can impose costs on their citizens.
To better understand these costs, you can analyze the distribution of prizes for a particular lottery using data from past draws. A good way to do this is with a scatter plot. Each point in the plot represents one application, and the color of each point indicates how many times that application has been awarded a position in a given draw. If a lottery is truly random, the points will have approximately the same distribution across rows and columns.
For example, the following chart shows a scatter plot for the Lotto 6/49 game in California from 2009 to 2021. In this case, the prize amounts for a single application are shown in the left column, and the number of applications received for each prize level is displayed on the right. A win for the top prize level, $50 million, occurs a little over 2% of the time.
