Lottery is a game of chance in which players pay a fixed amount of money, select numbers, or have machines randomly pick them for them, and win prizes if they match a winning combination. State governments have run lotteries for decades and use the revenue to fund everything from subsidized housing units to kindergarten placements. But critics argue that using lottery profits to finance public projects encourages people who can least afford it to gamble, while creating an unstable dependency on unpredictable gambling revenues.

The idea of winning the lottery and changing your life forever seems like an appealing one, but before you go buying tickets, it’s important to understand what you’re getting yourself into. While there are stories of lottery winners who did just that, many others have found their lives changed for the worse after winning big, sometimes even to the point of suicide.

In most cases, about half of all the money taken in for the lottery is awarded as prizes, while the other half goes toward, typically, education funds and promotional activities on behalf of the lottery. But statistics show that for every dollar bet, you lose twice as much.

As a result, most lottery players are men, blacks, and Native Americans who live in poor neighborhoods. According to the Atlantic, they buy more lottery tickets than the general population and lose disproportionately more than those in higher-income neighborhoods. The state-wide picture is even more troubling: Lottery proceeds are a significant part of government budgets, but states’ reliance on unpredictable gambling revenue puts them at a disadvantage in an anti-tax era.