Pam Peirce

The radicalism of the American revolution was that it was founded on horizontal relationships among people, not vertical. European monarchies included formal hierarchies.  The king was at the top and he was assumed to be ruling by divine right—his family was favored by God to provide the ruler.
     Then there was the nobility, who had the right to own land and be above commoners. but not to rule the nation. Below them were common people, who would always remain common people. The bourgeois, people who owned businesses, had begun to exist. Their business might give them some power, but they were still commoners.
     "Sumptuary laws" were the ones intended to keep people in their place. You might be a rich commoner, but you were still not permitted to wear certain cloth, or cloth dyed a certain color, for example.
     In the book The Hidden Injuries of Class, the authors, Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb, posit that the class is harder for Americans, because they imagine that they can rise in class—there is no belief system standing in the way. In a hierarchical society, there are "humble people," ones who know that rising in the class structure is not possible, so they don't even think about it. However, some Americans imagine that they should be able to become middle or upper class—there are no laws against it—and are bitterly disappointed when they do not.
     The worm at the core of the American apple was, of course, that the founders were thinking of white men with property, who were all to be equal. Americans were allowed to make exceptions for black slaves, and no one even thought of women as representing anything other than the status of their husbands. (I suppose that unmarried women were subsumed under the class status of the family member with whom they lived.) Nevertheless, we have come to a place in history in which many Americans take the promise of equality in the ability to rise quite seriously and are deeply dissatisfied when they cannot find a way to "move up."

Studies show that people with little money or wealth believe in luck as a means of becoming wealthy far more strongly than those who have more money or wealth. Poor people know they have little, but they have a greater hope that they will be lucky and acquire more. Hence the success of lotteries and gambling. Those who have money to invest (that is money beyond what they need to live), are more likely to invest it, or at least a good part of it, in something a bit more certain. (Though these days uncertainty is dogging even what used to be conservative investments do to our destabilizing presedent.)
In general, humans are gamblers. They risk a lot for possible gain. They sail in a small boat across an ocean, try to fly, risk all on business ideas that are doomed to fail. This kind of strategy has proven good for the species. We have moved about the globe, created various means of flight, and created businesses that have done very well. It has not worked out so well for individuals, whose boat sunk, flying machine crashed, or failed business put them in debt for decades.
This reckless optimism is built into our brains. Honeybees, another successful species, have a different brain structure. They send out scouts to find sources of pollen to feed their young. They only follow the scouts who are quite sure there is enough pollen somewhere to warrant many workers gathering it. For a little pollen, they don't go. Humans buy a lottery ticket with a huge payout. Several million tickets have been sold too. That means that the chance of winning is one in millions. But the human brain doesn't work that way. The human thinks: "Let's see, I could win, or I could lose. That's 50-50, right?"
The difference between the lottery and gambling at a casino is that no one is going to try to guilt trip you into buying a lottery ticket. They will market it to you, trying to convince you that it will make you happier to buy one, or even that it is a magnanimous act to buy one for someone else. However, I'm sure the marketing department first determined that if people bought tickets as gifts, they would not buy fewer for themselves, because the point of advertising is to grow the market, not dilute it.
A casino will try to guilt trip players into returning. They will send reminders  to frequent gamblers that "they haven't seen you in a while." They will offer discounted or free accommodations if you return. They will offer free golf games--whatever it takes. They hope, of course, that if you take these perks, you will feel guilty enough to return again. (One player gambled away an entire inheritance in order to of avoid guilt. They never stopped to think that if a casino could afford these perks, they probably were doing fine by taking the money of gamblers just like them—including them.)
A lottery is the same without the coercion, and humans, at least Americans, buy a lot of them. In 2023, the 13 states with lotteries sold 80 million tickets. My brother, who doesn't expect to win, and has enough to live on comfortably without winning, buys a few tickets a week as a contribution to California schools, which do, indeed, get .95 of each lottery dollar. I suppose this is gambling, but it is restrained gambling. But those who really need the money from winning, farmworkers who labor long days and barely make ends meet, line up to buy lottery tickets every day, in hopes of obtaining that comfort. The odds of winning are strongly against both my brother and them.