If you’ve ever bought a lottery ticket, chances are you were drawn to the idea of winning big money. But it’s not as easy as just slapping numbers down on a ticket. You have to choose your numbers carefully if you want to maximize your chances of winning. The key is to use numbers that haven’t been used in previous drawings. This can help you reduce the number of possible combinations that could win. Also, try to avoid numbers that start or end with the same digits. Richard Lustig, who won seven times in two years, says it’s important to cover the entire range of numbers in a lottery pool.

Lotteries have a long history in Europe and the United States, where they started out as public fundraisers but later became private enterprises. Early America was short on taxes but needed public works, and the Continental Congress even tried a lottery to raise funds for the Revolutionary War. Lotteries proved to be an efficient alternative, and by the 1830s they were used for everything from building Harvard, Dartmouth, and Yale to paying for civil defense.

While they weren’t widely popular in the early twentieth century, state lotteries began gaining traction. By the nineteen-sixties, a growing awareness of all the money to be made in the gambling business collided with a crisis in state funding. A combination of a growing population, inflation, and the cost of the Vietnam War was draining the coffers of many American states. It became increasingly difficult to balance the budget without raising taxes or cutting services, and both options were highly unpopular with voters.

In the wake of this fiscal disaster, the American public developed a preoccupation with unimaginable wealth, and a fascination with lotteries that promised it. But Cohen suggests that this fixation on lotteries, and the dream of a multimillion-dollar jackpot, corresponded with a decline in economic security for most working Americans. Income inequality widened, job security eroded, health-care costs soared, and the old national promise that hard work and education would guarantee prosperity largely ceased to be true.

And yet despite this, the lottery remains wildly popular. This may be in part because it offers a relatively low-cost and accessible form of gambling. But the real reason is that we have come to believe that the lottery represents a reliable route to wealth, one that can be accessed through a few quick and easy steps. In other words, we have fallen into the same trap that Lotto did: It sucks us in by promising that with just a little luck we can finally realize our true potential. And that’s a trap we can’t afford to fall into.