A segment on today’s Take Two featured an interview with a immigration policy expert on the Diversity Visa Lottery, a quirky program based partly on random selection that rewards applicants from countries that are under-represented among the nation’s immigrant diasporas. The Senate immigration reform bill proposes doing away with the program.
If the diversity visa sounds familiar, that’s because a related fiasco made headlines two years ago: In the spring of 2011, thousands of applicants were mistakenly informed they’d won an immigrant visa by the U.S. government, and then — whoops! — told there had been a computer glitch and that the good news was a mistake.
Google Alerts directed me to this brief article. Not particularly exciting, but I wonder what people think of the idea of random selection taking place entirely on a computer like this. Happens quite a lot, I gather–I think that’s how the Dutch medical school lottery is done. But it’s rather hard to verify that a lottery is fair when it’s just a guy typing commands into a computer in the comfort of his office. Thoughts? Does this matter?
There’s apparently a fictional newspaper online called the Mammalian Daily, which purports to cover the lives of a bunch of animals living in a zoo. Apparently, the animal leaders of the zoo are selected by sortition. See…
Short article by Stephen Kinsella, a lecturer in economics at University of Limerick, on Ireland’s democracy deficit. I am always happy to hear the word “sortition” discussed. I’m amazed by how many people–even academics, even political scientists, even scholars studying democracy–are not familiar with the term.
The process of selecting officials in ancient Greece was called sortition. All citizens – men of course – were eligible for elected office. Effectively, the citizens drew lots for ministries (the one with the shortest straw probably became minister for health). Continue reading →
A recent article on electoral tiebreaking by lottery. Like a lot of these articles (at least, those that don’t regard lotteries as some kind of communist plot), it takes essentially the Churchillian position–a coin toss is the worst way to break a tie, except for all the others:
It’s one of the weirder traditions of American democracy: In many states, if a race is tied, a “game by lot” — cards, straws, or most often, a coin toss — determines who goes to the house and who goes home. Months of campaigning, committee assignments, the fortunes of careers, the possibility of political change — it all comes down, like possession in a football game, to heads or tails.
Allowing chance to enter the core of a democratic system seems counterintuitive, although it’s widely recognized today as an electoral tiebreak. In fact, the roots of election by lottery stretch back to ancient Athens. (Modern-day Americans aren’t the first people to be wary of the method; it was also used by sorcerers to predict the future. “Sorcery” comes from the Latin sors, meaning “lot.”) More recently, coin tosses have broken ties in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, Washington, Florida, Minnesota and New Hampshire. South Dakota and Arizona have used card games. In Virginia, the winner has been chosen from a hat.
Scott Wentland (Longwood University) and I are working on a paper in which we explore the idea of randomly assigning legislators to districts when they come up for reelection. The working paper has received some attention at the Washington Post‘s blog: Would Congress work better if legislators were randomly assigned?
Kudos to Scott for his well-thought-out words to the press. We hope to have a revised version ready before the year is out. When it’s done, we’ll let you know.
Watched a TED talk this evening featuring a Stanford Business School Professor. (We’ve never met.) He presented a study suggesting that people might have more difficulty with certain types of tasks if they are presented with a difficult choice in advance than if the choice is made for them–even if the choice is made for them randomly. The argument isn’t completely clear to me, but that’s par for the course for TED. The talk is here–
As you may know, I am organizing a workshop at Trinity College Dublin on “The Lottery as a Democratic Institution.” This workshop will be co-organized by Gil Delannoi (Sciences Po) and Oliver Dowlen. The workshop will be held on October 11-12, 2012. Details about the workshop can be found at http://www.tcd.ie/policy-institute/events/Lottery_workshop_Oct12.php. Please consider attending, and spread the word about the event. Should you have any questions about it, please don’t hesitate to ask.
A few weeks ago, I got contacted by “The Point,” a weekly online panel discussion show put out by the Young Turks. The format of the show is that an expert delivers a “point” on some issue of the day, and then the panel discusses it for 15 minutes or so (with 3 points to a 45-minute show). They asked me to contribute a “point” about lotteries. The reason they asked me was because one of the panelists, Walter Kirn, had recently written an article on Obama’s decision to raffle off a dinner to a randomly-selected campaign donor. See–
I originally tried making a point specifically about Obama’s lottery, but the producer of the show wanted a more general point about lotteries. The resulting show is online:
I’m at the start of the second segment (about 18 minutes into the show). The show has been up for a couple of weeks, but I’ve been traveling, and only had the time to watch it yesterday. The good news is that they give a plug both to my book and to Equality by Lot (in the closing credits). The bad news is that the discussion of my point is complete garbage. None of these idiots seem to have even heard of lotteries before me. I think the hostess might even think I invented the idea of allocating goods by lot! I plan to drop them a line, but you might want to make a few comments on Youtube.
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