Distribution by lot | Equality by lot

Equality by Lot 2023 statistics

Posted on December 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the 14th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2023	Page views	Posts	Comments
Jan	2,611	7	12
Feb	2,845	10	68
Mar	3,343	9	68
Apr	3,274	9	27
May	2,417	9	26
June	2,558	6	45
July	2,502	5	14
Aug	3,604	4	74
Sept	3,020	9	64
Oct	2,894	10	28
Nov	2,118	8	9
Dec (to 24th)	1,781	7	7
Total	32,967	93	442

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the WordPress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 12 authors during 2023. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

This blog currently has 161 email followers and 362 WordPress followers. (As part of the upheaval at Twitter/X, automatic publishing to Twitter has been discontinued and “Twitter followers” are no longer being counted.)

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 2nd result (out of “about 80,000 results”), but it is not among the first few dozen results when searching for “sortition” (out of “about 3,740,000 results”). On the other hand, asking ChatGPT “what are good websites about sortition?” does return (for me, at least) Equality-by-Lot as one of the recommendations.

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Call for 2023 review input

Posted on December 8, 2023 by Yoram Gat

This is the yearly call for input for the year’s end review. As in previous years, I would like to have a post or two summarizing the ongoings here at Equality-by-Lot and notable sortition-related events over the passing year. Please respond in the comments below with your input. You are invited to refresh your memory about the events of the passing year by browsing Equality-by-Lot’s archives.

For previous years’ summaries see: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Sortition | 2 Comments »

Random selection in funding art

Posted on December 6, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Martin O’Leary, Studio Community Lead at Pervasive Media Studio, Watershed, writes in Arts Professional magazine.

An ancient practice of balloting is being put to use in application processes with the twin aims of reducing unpaid labour and increasing fairness

In the world of funding schemes, many organisations have experimented with random selection, led by the New Zealand Health Research Council in 2013. These experiments have been intended to increase the variety of work funded, by reducing the need to write ‘safe’ proposals. Organisations like the Swiss National Science Foundation, Innovate UK, the Nigerian government, and the Volkswagen Foundation, have all trialled random selection processes for funding science and innovation.

In the arts, there have been several schemes from large organisations like Jerwood Arts, as well as smaller, more DIY organisations like The Uncultured. Alongside aiming to increase the variety of projects funded, random selection is seen as a fairer way of distributing funding, which reduces the power differential between artists and funders.

Reducing unpaid labour

For the last year at Watershed in Bristol, we’ve been experimenting with random selection across a range of our programmes, as an alternative to more traditional selection processes for applicants. We were initially inspired by Jerwood Arts and their 1:1 Fund, in which they introduced randomness to increase the fairness of their application process. We’ve found the real benefit of the system comes in reducing the stress and unpaid labour demanded from applicants.

Before we introduced random selection, our annual winter residency programme typically received up to a hundred applications, competing for two or three places on the programme. Each of these applications included a written project proposal, which could take days to produce. By our estimates, adding up the total time spent across all applicants, we were asking for months of unpaid work — far more than the amount of funded time we offered to successful applicants.

In our new model, we ask applicants to complete a simple form to confirm their eligibility. Then we randomly select a pool of twelve applicants who form a shortlist for the residencies. Each of these applicants has time with our team to discuss their idea, after which they write up a full proposal and have a more formal interview. Because of the limited numbers, we’re able to pay a small stipend to everyone on the shortlist to cover their time preparing the full proposal.

Three models: total, early, late

When we talk about random selection, people often assume we’re giving out residencies entirely at random, removing ourselves completely from the process. This is a version of the process that we call ‘total’ random selection. It’s the simplest way of doing things, and it has real advantages in terms of speed and transparency. However, it’s a difficult process to control, and may lead to undesirable outcomes.
Continue reading →

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

Selection by lottery can make the university system more egalitarian

Posted on November 24, 2023 by Yoram Gat

ِA proposal by Sam Mace for randomization in university admittance. Conall Boyle’s work on this idea gets a mention.

It’s Time to Sort the University

University is the gateway to a better life. But the gap between elite and non-elite institutions and their admissions contradicts our self-convinced myths about meritocracy that we have developed. The best and the brightest do not necessarily attend our highest caliber and best funded institutions. Instead, all too often, it is the most well connected, the richest, and a lucky few others who are allowed to grace so many hallowed halls.

The reasoning behind the expansion of universities in the 20th century was to dramatically alter people’s economic and social status. But today, what kind of university someone goes to all too often determines their life path. Attending an Oxford or a Harvard may radically change a young person’s life, whereas for someone attending a Bradford or an Alabama State, this is far less likely to happen. Given the increasing pressures on funding for humanities and other scholarly subjects such as ancient history and classics, attending certain universities will soon include an irrevocable decision on what a student can study.

Therefore the question must be not just how many people can go to university but how fair is the admissions process for the very best universities. This question and similar ones about the role of universities has not just been asked by progressives but also by conservatives such as Christopher Lasch and Patrick Deneen. The fear of elite concentrations of economic, social, and cultural capital is keenly felt across the ideological spectrum. It is a problem that plagues the Anglosphere.

The exams to assess who gets a spot at university are more ruthlessly competitive than ever before. We use invigilators to ensure fairness and tie ourselves in knots over the ethics of using tools such ChatGPT, yet few of us are questioning the fairness of the admissions system in the first place. The enormous demand for the most prestigious universities sparks an ugly reality of fraud and inequality.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, education, Press, Proposals | Leave a comment »

Irish higher education minister laments the cruelty of random selection

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Yoram Gat

It turns out that entry to higher education programs (“courses”) in Ireland is determined by attaining some cutoff grade. Due to “grade inflation” many programs find themselves over-subscribed and select candidates via a lottery. The Irish higher education Minister Simon Harris expressed his misgivings about the use of random selection:

Random selection can be a particularly cruel and difficult way that you get the max points perhaps required, but you still find yourself not guaranteed a place in the course.

Mr. Harris’s empathy toward the anguish of those with good grades not having a guaranteed place is rather moving. Such students must be more anguished, it seems, than those who are denied a place in a program because they do not meet the cutoff grade.

For more on the convoluted elitist logic behind such statements, see my three part review of Connal Boyle’s book Lotteries for Education.

Filed under: Academia, Applications, Books, Distribution by lot, education, Press, schools | Leave a comment »

Malkin on Greek allotment

Posted on June 3, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Irad Malkin is a prominent Israeli classicist. He has already been mentioned twice on Equality by Lot, when in 2013 and 2014 he penned op-ed pieces advocating for the use of sortition as a tool of democracy. It seems that lottery and its role in Ancient Greek society has become Malkin’s main focus of research over the last few years. The product of this research is a forthcoming book called “Greeks Drawing Lots: from Egalitarianism to Democracy”.

A first taste of Malkin’s research is already available in the form of a chapter in a book published last year edited by Sofia Greaves and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and titled “Rome and the Colonial City: Rethinking the Grid”. The chapter written by Malkin is called “Reflections on egalitarianism and the foundation of Greek poleis“. It opens as follows:

When Greeks founded new settlements, they were facing the question of how to distribute plots of land to individual settlers. The main reason individuals joined a new foundation was to get such a plot of land (klêros), regardless of other reasons for colonisation. Back home, two brothers would need to share a klêros through partible inheritance by lot. However, if one brother stayed and another left for a new settlement abroad, both would have ended up, each, with a viable klêros. In and of itself, a klêros provides a basis for livelihood and a mutually recognised share of political and military power within the community. Practices of Greek colonisation are parallel to the Greek practice of ‘partible inheritance by lot’, since the same general principles and structures apply to both when it comes to land distribution: equality before the chance of the lottery, and, when possible, equality (sometimes equitability) of the size of the klêros.

From this we learn, if I understand correctly, that (like the English word “lot”?!) the word “klêros”, as in the randomizing machine “klêroterion”, meant in the first place a piece of fertile land, and the use of this word for randomization is derived from the custom of using the lottery for the distribution of such lands.

Malkin’s main thesis appears to be that the lottery was an embodiment of an egalitarian ideology. This ideology was especially influential in newly established colonies was in competition with oligarchization trends in more established settlements. It is this ideology that eventually, over the course of hundreds of years, developed into the Greek democracy.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, History, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Conley: Let’s Randomize America!

Posted on May 13, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Nicholas Coccoma wrote to point out a recent article by Dalton Conley, professor of sociology at Princeton University, in The New Yorker. The rather lengthy article revolves around randomness in public policy. It starts with the story of the introduction of the draft lottery in the US, then moves on to a proposal (a rather unconvincing one, it seems to me) for handling economic inequality using randomization, and finishes off with sortition and with a general call for using randomization to achieve a fairer society.

For three decades, through three wars, the U.S. military draft was directed by Lewis B. Hershey, a general in the Army. Hershey established the first local draft board in 1941; eventually, there would be four thousand of them. […] The boards, which adjudicated claims for reclassification or deferment on a case-by-case basis, had a distinct character. They were disproportionately white, white-collar, and elderly. According to analyses conducted in the nineteen-sixties, draft boards more often granted deferments to privileged young men, and poor Americans of color made up a disproportionate share of draftees. […] In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson convened a group of experts to study draft reform. They recommended a drastic overhaul to centralize the process, and argued, controversially, for randomizing it. What was needed, they wrote, was a lottery to decide who should fight, in which the “order of call” was “impartially and randomly determined.”

Many people did not find this idea appealing. Detractors argued that haphazardly drafting young men, some of whom were training for critical civilian positions, would be inefficient at best and destructive at worst. Merriam Trytten, a physicist by training, who was the president of the Scientific Manpower Commission—a nonpartisan group set up by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to advise the government on issues of scientific personnel—said that, under such a system, “scientific effort in the United States will pay a substantial penalty.” […] A Gallup poll conducted in 1966 found that only thirty-two per cent of Americans favored a lottery system.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Academia, Distribution by lot, History, Proposals, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Catalonia Picks UBI Recipients by Lottery

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Conall Boyle

Peter Knight writes on the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) website:

The Universal Basic Income (UBI) pilot plan is one of the projects that the Catalan Government will carry out during this term of office that ends in February 2025.

In the Catalan pilot plan, some 5,000 people will receive the UBI: 2,500 will be randomly selected from all households in Catalonia and the remaining 2,500 will correspond to the population of two municipalities.

During the two years of the pilot, participants will receive a monthly payment of €800 per adult and €300 per child under 18 years of age. Individuals with the 10% highest incomes will be excluded from participating in the pilot, as well as people who have paid the patrimony tax (real estate of more than 500.000 euros). This is because the economic simulations of what an hypothetical basic income policy in Catalonia would look like, stated that the balance between the taxes and the amount of money of the UBI would be negative for the 10-15% highest incomes – they wouldn’t have a net gain with the UBI. That’s why the design excludes them from the pilot. Also excluded are people who have had to pay the patrimony tax so as not to include people without labour income (who would be eligible) but have enormous wealth in properties (living off investments, rents, etc.).

All persons who, once the random selection by addresses and municipalities has been carried out and their selection has been communicated by mail, formalize their willingness to participate by means of the web form, will be considered as participants in the pilot plan.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Elections, Experiments | Leave a comment »

Equality by Lot 2022 statistics

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Yoram Gat

Below are some statistics about the 13th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.

2022	Page views	Posts	Comments
Jan	4,070	15	183
Feb	2,557	6	24
Mar	2,772	10	26
Apr	2,942	8	20
May	3,557	8	26
June	2,455	5	48
July	2,333	8	11
Aug	3,797	7	32
Sept	2,960	6	5
Oct	3,278	10	21
Nov	3,110	10	27
Dec (to 23st)	2,263	5	92
Total	36,094	98	515

Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the WordPress system does not count those visits.

Posts were made by 16 authors during 2022. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

This blog currently has 160 email followers, 356 WordPress followers and 511 Twitter followers (@Klerotarian).

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 3rd result (out of “about 77,000 results”). Equality-by-Lot is now on the 12th page of results when searching for “sortition” using the Google search engine (out of “about 339,000 results”).

Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Call for 2022 review input

Posted on December 17, 2022 by Yoram Gat

This is the yearly call for input for the year’s end review. As in previous years, I would like to have a post or two summarizing the ongoings here at Equality-by-Lot and notable sortition-related events over the passing year. Any input about what should be included is welcome – either through comments below or via email. You are invited to refresh your memory about the events of the passing year by browsing Equality-by-Lot’s archives.