The lottery, the game where you buy a ticket for a chance to win a great sum of money, is a form of gambling that can be addictive and often leads to financial ruin. There’s a much greater chance of getting struck by lightning or becoming a billionaire than there is of winning the Mega Millions, yet Americans spend more than $80 billion on lottery tickets each year. Many of those who win end up worse off than they were before the jackpot, owing enormous amounts in taxes and struggling with debt.

There’s also the issue of how these games suck the lifeblood out of local communities. In the small town depicted in “The Lottery,” a woman named Tessie Hutchinson wins a large prize and immediately turns her life upside down. Then she’s forced to move away, leaving behind the friends and neighbors who helped her through tough times, and that community feels a loss. The narrator, Adam Cohen, tries to make sense of the lottery in light of these realities.

He starts by describing the ritual of the event itself, an annual gathering in the unnamed village on June 27 for the drawing. Children pile up stones, and Old Man Warner quotes an ancient proverb: “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.” The villagers also hold a yearly stoning of someone who they think is evil, which seems to be based on the idea that the scapegoat will purge the community of all the bad things that are happening.

Lotteries have been around for a long time, and although their abuses have strengthened the arguments of those who oppose them, they have also financed everything from the construction of the British Museum to bridges in America. They’ve even been tangled up in slavery, with George Washington once managing a Virginia-based lottery whose prizes included human beings and Denmark Vesey purchasing his freedom in a South Carolina lottery before going on to foment a slave rebellion.

In modern times, state-run lotteries provide a significant portion of government revenue. But because they don’t come with the same transparency as a traditional tax, they aren’t seen as a direct burden on citizens. In fact, in many cases when a lottery is promoted, it’s sold as a way to bolster a particular line item in the budget, such as education or public parks.

But as lottery proceeds have dwindled, states have found it increasingly difficult to balance their budgets without raising taxes or cutting services that are popular with voters. And so, in an attempt to keep ticket sales up, they’ve begun to pay out a larger percentage of the total pool in prizes—which, of course, reduces the amount of money that’s available for other purposes. And that, in turn, erodes the public’s confidence in the whole enterprise. Ultimately, this approach isn’t sustainable and can’t be justified on moral grounds alone. Instead, governments need to rethink their approach. They need to change the way they think about the lottery.