Big Lottery? Big Deal.
Surely you’ve noticed the increase in state lotteries popping up, upping the ante with sports and entertainment tie-ins and bigger and bigger prize pools. Seems like another example of forward-thinking revenue generation, right?
Wrong. In yet another example of how there are NO new ideas, I stumbled across this painting, circa 1790, titled “Man Holding a Massachusetts Lottery Ticket.” That’s 220 years ago! 
A little google work reveals that state governments have been running lotteries to build schools and churches since the 1400s. There’s one running in the Netherlands that’s been going since 1726!
It’s tough for a brand to compete with the modern lottery prize pools, which have run as high as $360 million. You’d need a ton of tie-in partners to raise that kind of prize pool, and the state’s prize is all cash.
It’s funny that the selling point of many of today’s state-run lotteries is to fund education. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia were all funded by lotteries back in the 1800s . . .
