Further to Terry Bouricius’s query below, I have managed a rough translation, in MS Word .docx format.
(It’s in large font which I find easier to read on-screen!)
To read it click: Vergne 2013 engl trans
Filed under: Academia, Sortition | Leave a comment »
Terry Hulsey is a writer living in Fort Worth, Texas, who has asked me to flag this:
Instituting Meritocracy After the Collapse of Democracy in America
“Democracy in America has failed. The Framers would not have been surprised.
The central idea of the American Experiment is that our several states have united to form a republic of strictly limited federal power, not a democracy. Without understanding this kernel idea, that the founders repudiated democracy and consciously labored to restrain it, there simply no possibility of understanding the meaning of America.
The specific conditional campaign that will bridle democracy, that will restore federalism in Madison’s sense, is one that mobilizes support for the passage of the Twenty-Eighth Amendment (below) to randomize the election of Congressmen and Senators, and indirectly, the President of the United States.”
Read more at http://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/09/terry-hulsey/instituting-meritocracy-after-the-collapse-of-democracy-in-america/
Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition | 2 Comments »
Randomness – using a lottery – can be a crafty little tool in many ways other than selecting Citizens Juries. How it works depends on human psychology. We know what selection by lottery is meant to do – keep Human Judgement out of it! Or to put it more formally: it is either its ‘sanitizing’ effect (Peter Stone) or the arrationality effect (Olly Dowlen).
But human psychology comes into it as well. Which is more valuable – a gift of 1 Euro or a lottery ticket with a 1 in a 1,000,000 chance of 500,000 Euro?
Easy, say you hyper-rational kleroterians! Take the money.
Not so! The General Public are quite happy to buy tickets every week for such a lottery with an expected loss of 50% of your stake. There’s something about lottery prizes that makes them more valuable than the expected prize – and can also make a small loss more painful than a large gain. The statistician Jimmy Savage discovered these ‘irrational’ traits of the human mind when developing Decision Theory.
Continue reading
Filed under: Applications, Distribution by lot | Tagged: Randomness | 7 Comments »
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
― Adam Smith (not Karl Marx as you might have thought!)
Filed under: Sortition | 10 Comments »
Daniel McFadden of UC Berkley produced a paper in 2011 which is mostly about what he calls Economic Juries. This is just like the German CJs that we have heard about previously from Antoine Vergne which were tasked with deciding whether to go ahead with new public infrastructure projects. So it’s interesting to see economists picking up on this idea.
McFadden’s paper has the anodyne title The Human Side of Mechanism Design, and you can read the paper on my website www.conallboyle.com
I found it the paper his website, but academics could obtain it from Athens. McFadden is one of the better guys, an economist who understands a bit about real humans.
The main ‘mechanism’ he investigates is the use of a jury to decide issues of public spending. Apart from a passing reference to deciding if a new park should be established at Boulder, Colorado, no actual examples of Economic Juries are given. But the theoretical reasons for using an EJ, they methods that could be used to inform them and elicit their real opinions are explored — in other words can a jury work? can it decide correctly? can it evade the human failings of bias, framing, short-termism etc. etc.?
Warning! This paper is a bit wonkish (to use Krugman’s phrase).
So CJs (or EJs to use McFadden’s term): They would be an alternative to the democratic, elected representatives deciding. Would EJs work better? At what? Discovering the General Will perhaps???
Filed under: Applications, Juries, Opinion polling, Participation, Theory | 3 Comments »
News about ‘Democracy’ from Iceland
If Iceland demonstrates the possibilities of direct democracy, recent months have also exposed its limitations. A row still rages over the country’s constitution, which was created after its economic collapse. When 950 Icelanders, randomly chosen from the national register, gathered for one day in 2010 to decide its founding principles it was hailed as the world’s first “crowd-sourced” constitution. Continue reading
Filed under: Ballot measures, Distribution by lot, Initiatives, Participation | 1 Comment »
The death of James M Buchanan, the notorious Public Choice Theory economist has sparked some interesting discussion on ‘Crooked Timber’, my fav. intellectual blog.
I found myself nodding in vigorous agreement with the following
Continue reading
Filed under: Elections, Sortition, Theory | 23 Comments »
In a Spanish town where one in three people are without a job, getting one can depend quite literally on the luck of the draw.
Alameda is surrounded by neat rows of olive trees that stretch for miles towards the distant sierra. Two hours east of Seville, the town is a maze of narrow streets lined by orange trees and whitewashed houses.
Filed under: Distribution by lot, Employment | Leave a comment »
Yes, they should, says the Irish Constitutional Convention. No they shouldn’t, says an condemnatory editorial in the Irish Times.
The faceless sixty-six
It’s bad enough that the Government should severely circumscribe the agenda of the constitutional convention, but it is bizarre and unprecedented decision to turn it into an advertising focus group by allowing its 66 “citizen” members to remain anonymous takes the biscuit. What price transparency, supposedly one of our new core values?
[…]
Filed under: Juries | 20 Comments »
There must be a lottery fan at work in the Guardian! (There is of course. Our very own kleroterian Martin Wainwright.)
Unthinkable? The Eton raffle
It seems only fair to offer every 13-year-old the same chance of being immersed in a community entirely directed to helping them shine
A cursory glance at the background of the new establishment confirms that Eton is flourishing beyond Henry VI’s wildest ambitions. It’s not only the new archbishop of Canterbury, nor the next but one in line for the throne, nor of course the PM, his chief of staff, nor even the chief whipand the chancellor’s chief economic adviser. There are the actors (Eddie Redmayne, Dominic West, Damian Lewis), the diplomats, the mandarins and all those cabinet ministers. And the London mayor. The school hasproduced 19 of 53 prime ministers, but who would have expected such a 21st-century renaissance of privilege? Eton always boasted that it was comprehensive. The difference between it and, say, neighbouring Slough is the indefinite article and approximately £30,000 a year. This buys your lad world-class academic, artistic and sporting facilities plus star teachers drawn by top-dollar pay. For seven days a week, 24 hours a day, pupils are immersed in a community entirely directed to helping them shine. It seems only fair to offer every 13-year-old the same chance. All parents of 10-year-olds (yes, girls too) would be issued with a special 09- phone number. It would cost, say, £15 a call to defray lost fees, and the number could only be used once. Two hundred names would then be drawn from a top hat. For the next three years they’d prepare, learning to tie a white tie while mugging up on Latin so they too could cry “Floreat Etona”. Twenty years on, high offices might at last be filled from humble homes.
Filed under: Distribution by lot, schools | Leave a comment »
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Equality by lot 