Two New Publications

Posted on September 2, 2013 by peterstone

I’ve recently published two articles that might prove of interest. First, I wrote a review essay dealing with the Imprint Academic series on Sortition and Public Policy. It’s just appeared in the latest issue of Redescriptions: Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory (volume 16, 2012/2013). It’s been in the pipeline for a while, and so regrettably does not cover the latest offerings in the series (such as Conall Boyle’s interesting book on educational lotteries). The issue is at https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/handle/123456789/42047

Second, Comparative Education Review just published a symposium on “Fair Access to Higher Education: A Comparative Perspective” (volume 57, no. 3, August 2013). It contains a paper of mine entitled “Access to Higher Education by the Luck of the Draw.” The paper deals with university admissions in general and the Irish case in particular. It’s available on JSTOR at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669235, but only if your library/university subscribes.

Sorry to be incommunicado. I’ve been away for much of the summer, and have a very busy term ahead of me, but I hope to rejoin the conversation soon.

Filed under: Academia, Books, Distribution by lot, House of Lords, Proposals, schools, Sortition, Theory | 13 Comments »

Lottery – our cunning little ‘Swiss army knife’?

Posted on June 20, 2013 by Conall Boyle

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: | 7 Comments »

“Tennessee’s GOP Governor Rejects Medicaid Expansion, Leaves Residents To ‘Health Care Lottery’”

Posted on June 7, 2013 by peterstone

“Tennessee’s GOP Governor Rejects Medicaid Expansion, Leaves Residents To ‘Health Care Lottery’”

Gov. Bill Haslam (R-TN) announced on Wednesday that he will not pursue Obamacare’s optional expansion of the Medicaid program, which would extend health coverage to an additional 140,000 uninsured Tennesseans […].

[…]

Since there are a significant number of low-income Tennessee residents whose annual incomes put them above the cut-off for TennCare coverage, but whose expensive medical bills make them unable to afford to purchase private insurance on their own, the state holds a “health care lottery” twice a year to allow those residents to call in for a special application for TennCare. The phone lines are flooded, and many people are unable to get through. Many of those people would be eligible to gain public health insurance coverage under the Medicaid expansion, and would no longer have to desperately dial a state number in the hopes of winning an elusive lottery to access the care they need.

Not the most edifying use of a lottery–a bit like cannibalizing someone by lottery because you’re feeling too lazy to go to the supermarket.

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

On a Lighter Note…

Posted on May 20, 2013 by peterstone

On a Lighter Note…

Google alerts brought this to my attention. The same paper (with no author indicated) can be found at http://www.handmenotes.com. At first, I thought someone had written some kind of working paper on my work. But it looks like this is intended for use by students trying to cheat on a term paper assignment. I had no idea that enough professors were assigning my work as to justify circulating a paper like this. I’m deeply touched.

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

Diversity Lottery

Posted on May 16, 2013 by peterstone

It appears that the U.S. Diversity Lottery may be in trouble. Thoughts?

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.

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

“They Can Do It All on a Computer”

Posted on May 2, 2013 by peterstone

“They Can Do It All on a Computer”

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?

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Juries, Press, Sortition | Tagged: , , | 28 Comments »

The most basic democratic right? Beneficial ownership of natural resources

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Conall Boyle

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 »

“Put the right man in the right job”

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Yoram Gat

Burin Kantabutra writes to the Thai Nation:

Random assignments will make situation worse

Police chief Adul Saengsingkaew refuses to reconsider his order to select officers randomly from a pool of 4,000 specialist investigators nationwide and send them to fill vacancies in the strife-ridden South. This lottery is wrong from top to bottom.

The concept of a national police force goes directly against former prime minister Anand Panyarachun’s “Seven Pillars of Sustainable Democracy”, one of which is decentralisation. A police force must, by its nature, be localised, for each region differs from others – especially the South. For example, how many cops in Bangkok or Isaan speak Yawi and understand Islam and its culture? How will they communicate effectively with locals, let alone investigate? The cops from each region should be drawn from, and be accountable to, the region’s citizenry, through its elected representatives. Not only the police lottery, but the department itself, is built upon a false premise, one of national homogeneity.

Not surprisingly, those who are forced to do anything will not be willing workers, and are likely to be ineffective – further aggravating the volatile situation down south. Continue reading →

Filed under: Distribution by lot, Press | 4 Comments »

2012 review – statistics

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Yoram Gat

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

2012 Page views Posts Comments
Jan 1,740 10 122
Feb 2,030 9 116
Mar 2,009 11 131
Apr 1,474 8 93
May 2,008 10 101
June 1,333 7 57
July 1,642 5 10
Aug 1,758 11 200
Sept 1,483 7 140
Oct 2,505 4 120
Nov 1,474 9 55
Dec (to 22rd) 1,627  9 106
Total  21,083  100  1,251

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

The system reports that posts were made by 9 authors during 2012, with one of those authors making only one contribution. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)

There are currently 69 email and WordPress followers of this blog. (The figure 107 displayed on the home page includes those 69 followers as well as “Facebook followers”. I am not sure what Facebook followers are.)

Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the third result (out of “about 33,600 results”). Searching for “sortition” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 8th result (out of “about 98,900 results”). Searching for “kleroterion” returns Equality-by-Lot as the 6th result (out of “about 5,210 results”).

2010 Page views Posts Comments
Jan 288 8 30
Feb 242 12 29
Mar 417 7 28
Apr 252 5 16
May 344 6 18
Jun 259 6 15
Jul 324 9 20
Aug 372 7 93
Sep 550 10 38
Oct 704 6 97
Nov 1091 10 133
Dec (thru 23rd) 458 6 41
Total 5301 92 558

Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition | 14 Comments »

Call for 2012 review input

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Yoram Gat

This year, as in the last two (2011, 2010), I would like to create a post or two summarizing the sortition- and distribution-by-lot-related developments of the year and the activity here on Equality-by-Lot.

Please use the comments to give your input on what you think are the most mention-worthy events or essays of the past year.

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

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