People spent upward of $100 billion on lottery tickets in 2021, and states use proceeds to boost budgets for education, roads and other infrastructure. But just how important those funds are to the broader state budget and whether they’re worth the trade-off of people losing money isn’t clear.

The lottery is a remarkably popular form of gambling that can be fun and rewarding, but also financially dangerous. The odds of winning the jackpot are long, but for many lottery players, that doesn’t matter. They buy into a myth of winning, and they do it to the tune of forgoing savings for retirement or college tuition.

Lottery advertisements evoke aspirations by featuring stories of past winners and depicting their newfound wealth. These narratives, along with the repetition of zeroes in a jackpot figure, make winning seem both attainable and life-changing. And when the prize grows, so do the promotional efforts—on television, on the radio and on billboards.

Some people try to game the lottery by studying patterns in previous winning numbers and buying multiple tickets, for example. Others follow quote-unquote “systems” that don’t stand up to any statistical scrutiny—choosing the same numbers every time, for instance, in the hope that it will smooth out the distribution of results and increase their chances of hitting. This is the sort of thing that people do when they’re irrational gamblers, not prudent ones, and it’s probably a big part of why some people lose money on lottery tickets.