How did the 1969 draft lottery change the socio‑economic composition of Vietnam draftees?

1. Why reform was launched: complaints of a class‑biased system

By 1969 public and political pressure portrayed the pre‑lottery system as stacking the burden of service against lower‑income and less‑educated men, and President Nixon asked Congress to equalize the order of calls and institute a lottery to reduce that bias ^{[1] [4]}. The Selective Service’s public account records the December 1, 1969 drawing as a deliberate change from calling the oldest first toward a randomized “order of call” for men born 1944–1950 ^[3].

2. What the lottery actually did: randomness without instant equality

The lottery assigned each birth date a priority number by random draw, so that draft risk became a function of an exogenously assigned number rather than entirely local board discretion ^{[3] [6]}. That randomness created a cleaner instrument for researchers to compare otherwise similar men who, by chance, faced different draft risk — a fact the economics literature exploits to measure causal effects of conscription ^{[7] [8]}.

3. Ways the socio‑economic composition still remained skewed

Randomness in selection reduced one axis of bias but left other sorting mechanisms intact: educational, occupational, and paternity deferments still existed at the time and local boards retained some discretion until Nixon’s April 1970 executive order limited new deferments ^{[4] [9]}. Wealthier families more often could exploit legal advantages, travel, or influence to avoid induction and some emigrated, and voluntary enlistment plus military eligibility standards continued to shape who actually served ^{[10] [5]}.

4. Net empirical effects seen by social scientists

Empirical work using lottery numbers as an instrument finds measurable socio‑economic consequences of being exposed to higher draft risk and wartime service — impacts on schooling, lifetime earnings and family outcomes — which imply the lottery altered the composition of those who experienced military service and its downstream effects ^{[7] [8] [11]}. But those studies also underscore that the lottery operates as an “intention‑to‑treat” in many analyses because deferments and draft‑avoidance meant that high lottery numbers did not mechanically translate into uniform induction ^{[4] [9]}.

5. Racial and class disparities: partly attenuated, partly persistent

Contemporary observers and oral histories document that before the lottery African Americans were over‑represented among draftees and combat troops, and while the lottery reduced a source of procedural bias it did not immediately eliminate disparities rooted in socioeconomic differences and differential access to deferments or exemptions ^{[10] [1]}. Economic and demographic follow‑up work shows the lottery’s ripple effects — for fertility, labor markets, and intergenerational outcomes — varied across states and groups depending on local policy environments and the degree to which deferments remained operative ^{[9] [11]}.

6. Bottom line: a structural reform that narrowed one channel of inequality but left others

The 1969 lottery converted the draft’s front‑end selection into a transparent, random mechanism and thereby reduced the formal bias of birthday‑dependent calls, creating a more uniform statistical risk ^{[3] [1]}. However, because deferments, voluntary enlistment patterns, eligibility rules, and the practical ability to avoid service continued to be stratified by class and race, the socio‑economic composition of those who actually served changed only partially and unevenly — a reality the scholarly literature documents by treating lottery assignment as an imperfect instrument for actual military service ^{[5] [7] [4]}.