Selecting Police (partly) by Lottery

Posted on April 11, 2016 by Conall Boyle

The Long Island Exchange reports that Suffolk County, Long Island, NY (Pop.1.5 mn) Police Department is holding a lottery for the order in which qualified candidates are assessed:

Gregory Hosts Lottery to Rank New Suffolk Police Candidates

(Long Island, NY) Suffolk County Legislature Presiding Officer DuWayne Gregory on March 4 hosted a lottery in which the 3,739 individuals attaining a score of 95 on the written exam to become a Suffolk County Police Officer were ranked in priority order to advance to the next stages of the selection process. The lottery was live-streamed from the William H. Rogers Legislature Building in Hauppauge.

The additional phases of the selection process include a personality and psychological assessment, physical fitness test, medical examination, a polygraph examination and a background investigation.  After the testing and background review are completed, candidates who successfully complete all parts of the selection process will be considered for appointment in the same sequence in which their names were drawn in the lottery.

Suffolk County Legislature Presiding Officer DuWayne Gregory pulls a name at the March 4 lottery in which the 3,739 individuals attaining a score of 95 on the test to become a Suffolk County Police Officer were ranked in priority order to advance in the next stages of the selection process. Gregory hosted the lottery at the William H. Rogers Legislature Building in Hauppauge, from which it was live-streamed. Photo Credit: Suffolk County.
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Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | Leave a comment »

An old idea re-cycled—babies allocated at random

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Conall Boyle

What a daft notion!

If you want to, you can read the full article here:

https://aeon.co/opinions/if-babies-were-randomly-allocated-to-families-would-racism-end

Filed under: Distribution by lot | Leave a comment »

Now even the visa lottery is unsafe?

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Conall Boyle

According to the NYT,

a small number of giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the [U.S. H1B visa lottery] system with applications, significantly increasing their chances of success. […O]ne of the outsourcing companies applied for at least 14,000.

What has happened to the ‘sanitizing’ effect of the lottery?

Does it matter that well-resourced companies ‘game’ this lottery?

[‘Outsourcing‘: A practice used by different companies to reduce costs by transferring portions of work to outside suppliers rather than completing it internally. (investopia) In the UK this practice is known as ‘sub-contracting’.]

Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot, Employment, Press | 2 Comments »

Unthinkable: Should college places be awarded by lottery?

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Conall Boyle

An excellent article in the Irish Times:

Unthinkable: Should college places be awarded by lottery?

Using a lottery is preferable to distributing goods based on ‘bad reasons’, argues political scientist Peter Stone.

Dr Peter Stone of TCD’s political science department believes there’s scope for greater use of lotteries in society as a way of keeping “bad reasons” out of decision-making. Rather than seeing lotteries as a failure of imagination, he argues that those who dismiss lotteries can “have the failure of imagination because they think there must be a good reason for distinguishing [between options], even though we haven’t found it yet”.

School admissions are a “classic case” where lotteries are preferable, he says, and he extends the argument to third-level admission. Criticising the recent CAO reforms, which try to minimise random selection in the points race, he provides today’s idea: “Not only should we not be reducing the amount of random selection [in college admissions], we should be letting more in.”

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Distribution by lot | Leave a comment »

How to make your $$$$ lose value — randomly

Posted on September 23, 2015 by Conall Boyle

Imagine that the Fed were to announce that, a year from today, it would pick a digit from zero to 9 out of a hat. All currency with a serial number ending in that digit would no longer be legal tender. Suddenly, the expected return to holding currency would become negative 10 percent.

This, was the suggestion put forward in 2009 by the economist N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, to overcome the ‘problem’ that the dollar/pound/euro in your pocket could not be taxed when inflation falls below zero.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Proposals | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

Socialism in the USA — and they love it!

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Conall Boyle

I’m sure most of you know about the lottery used to allocate newly qualifying players to the NFL football teams. But it unusual to see this described as ‘Socialism’ in the New Statesman, a major UK political magazine.

You can read the full article here (no paywall): The socialist principles at the heart of American Football.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Employment, Sport | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

Citizens’ Juries: Taken for Fools?

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Conall Boyle

Following the rejection of the Icelandic citizens’ jury’s conclusions on constitutional reform, it is disappointing to report that much the same has happened in Ireland:

[T]he people who were involved really cared about this thing and did everything they could to make it a model for new ways of thinking about democracy in the 21st century. There was a glimmer of hope that some kind of dignity was being restored to the political process. Instead all it’s really done is to polish up the sign on the gates of institutional democracy: abandon hope all ye who enter here.

The process showed that, given half a chance, citizens are not cynical and want to engage positively with their State. It also showed that that State, given half a chance, will make them feel like fools for wasting their time.

You can read the full article here: Fintan O’Toole: How hopes raised by the Constitutional Convention were dashed.

Filed under: Applications, Ballot measures, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , | 7 Comments »

Why women fail to take an equal share of top posts in academia

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Conall Boyle

Here’s a nice piece in today’s Irish Times, showing clearly the need for lottery selection in jobs.

It asks the question: Why women (despite being over 50% of the faculty staff) fail to take an equal share of top posts in academia?

You can read the article in full (and for free!) at

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/why-women-fail-to-take-an-equal-share-of-top-posts-in-academia-1.2108539.

In the comments section we the usual reaction to any suggestion of ‘affirmative action’

“Here we go, more feminist claptrap. All academic posts must be based on merit.”

To which a wise commentator replies: “You think merit has much to do with academic appointments? There’s usually an assessor’s box called suitability which you can fill with subliminal prejudices: plays golf, politics, sounds like me etc”.

While waiting for grand schemes of sortitionist democracy to be implemented, wouldn’t it be nice to have a bit of genuine equality based on lottery selection over the qualified candidates?

Filed under: Academia, Distribution by lot, education, Employment, Press | Tagged: , | 38 Comments »

What is a Grand Jury and why is it so controversial?

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Conall Boyle

It would be very disappointing to find that the jury principal was fatally flawed, not the sure defence of the rights of the individual against the over-mighty power of the State that we have always believed.

A Grand Jury seems (for us) a superb idea. Following a significant and contested incident a random selection of 23 (?) citizens is summoned to hear the evidence, debate it and decide on a course of action. Rather than stilling protest, in the US the Grand Jury seems to foment it.

So could I ask our US contributors to explain (and I apologise for using this forum for FAQs).

Is a Grand Jury (GJ) as I’ve described it above?

What is wrong with the process that makes its verdicts so un-acceptable?

Filed under: Juries | 15 Comments »

Madness! – South Dakota opts for a water lottery

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Conall Boyle

The South Dakota state Water Board has to determine when existing groundwater sources are ‘fully appropriated’ (used to the limit e.g. by farmers for irrigation). Applications for fully appropriated aquifers are accepted during a 30-day time period.  Applications are placed in a lottery drawing system. The winners will then be announced. This is the first time for this procedure; South Dakota is the first (US) state to allocate water resources by lottery.

Comment: Another bizarre example of valuable state assets being gifted to profit-seeking enterprises.

The water in South Dakota, it has been established, belongs to the people. It should be a source of revenue for them. Gifting it to businesses deprives the good folks of SD some relief from taxation. But it gets worse: distributing allocations by lottery means that the precious water may not be used for the most productive use.

By definition, valuable goods distributed by lottery are given away below the price that would balance supply and demand. We accept this for college places because society demands that educational opportunity should not depend solely on ability to pay. But giving away publicly-owned assets to business enterprises for free or by lottery is economic illiteracy.

This is not the only example of such naiveté that can be found in the arch-capitalist US of A: oil-drilling licences, radio-spectra, hunting permits, rafting permits, student accommodation are all given away by lottery! Wake up you citizens of America! Reclaim what is yours! Stop the corporate free-loading! Stop the lotteries for public assets!

Source for this story: http://www.argusleader.com/story/opinion/readers/2014/10/20/voice-south-dakota-water-lottery/17595461/

Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot | 13 Comments »

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