For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America
Written by Jonathan D. Cohen
Narrated by Tom Lennon
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About this audiobook
The story of lotteries in the United States may seem straightforward: tickets are bought predominately by poor people driven by the wishful belief that they will overcome infinitesimal odds and secure lives of luxury. The reality is more complicated. For a Dollar and a Dream shows how, in an era of stagnant upward mobility, millions of Americans turned to the lottery as their only chance at achieving the American Dream. Gamblers were not the only ones who bet on betting. As voters revolted against higher taxes in the late twentieth century, states saw legalized gambling
as a panacea, a way of generating revenue without cutting public services or raising taxes. Alongside stories of lottery winners and losers, Jonathan Cohen shows how gamblers have used prayer to help them win a jackpot, how states tried to pay for schools with scratch-off tickets, and how lottery advertising has targeted lower income and nonwhite communities.
For a Dollar and a Dream charts the untold history of the nation's lottery system, revealing how players and policymakers alike got hooked on hopes for a gambling windfall.
Jonathan D. Cohen
Jonathan D. Cohen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University. He earned his Doctoral and Masters degrees from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and earned his Bachelors degree from Duke University. His interests include polygonal simplification and other software acceleration techniques, parallel rendering architectures, collision detection, and high-quality interactive computer graphics. Jon’s e-mail address is cohen@cs.jhu.edu.
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