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.”
I just wanted to recommend a working paper by Daniela Cammack entitled “Deliberation in Classical Athens: Not Talking, But Thinking (and Voting).” It’s available online here. It’s not directly about sortition, but it deals with a number of themes discussed on this blog. The paper argues that the Athenians maintained a careful distinction between the function of presenting arguments and the function of evaluating those arguments, and assigned the latter, but not the former, to the assembly. This distinction, Cammack argues, is conflated by those who use the term “deliberation” for both functions.
I found this passage particularly relevant to contemporary politics:
In Athens, then, as in modern democracies, an overwhelming majority of non-speaking voters attempted to control a minority of prominent political actors who took primary responsibility for advocating and carrying policies. The key difference between Athenian and modern democracy was not that all or even many Athenians took part in political discussion, but first, that large samples of ordinary citizens had the opportunity to vote on every political decision, and second, that the barriers to becoming politically influential were relatively low, while the risks associated with this position were high. This is the reverse of the situation today, where a high barrier to entry as a politician–largely financial–is combined with a low risk of losing one’s position once established. To be sure, one can fail to be reelected, but this pales in comparison to the mechanisms of accountability available in Athens, such as routine annual audits (euthynai) covering both moral and financial issues. In many modern systems, by contrast, a feedback loop is set up in which corruption becomes endemic, since the high costs of running for election are in large part met by supporters whose opportunity to shape policy then becomes significantly greater than that of ordinary voters, with very little way for those ordinary voters to hold the politician in question to account, either before or after the next election.
Global movement towards representative legislatures
St. Louis, Missouri, 18 October: A world-wide movement towards establishing legislative bodies that are fully representative finds expression in the staged reading of “Our Common Lot” by David Grant. The short play is written for an international conference, “Democracy for the 21st Century,” to be held in December at the Library of Alexandria, Egypt.
In the play, Marisa, Alma, Sami, and Ali live in a city embroiled in conflict and violence — the Regime, the Opposition, the Opposition to the Opposition. When the fighting stops, they ask themselves: What is the best way to move forward? “Our Common Lot” argues for choosing legislators in the way that the first democracy did – by random lot, known as ‘sortition.’
In the original Athenian democracy, sortition was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy. Most recently the city of Melbourne, Australia has used a random sample of citizens to determine its ten-year financial plan. Two-thirds of the recent Irish Constitutional Convention was composed of sortitionally-chosen citizens.
The reading of “Our Common Lot” is its world premiere. The ensemble includes Adam Flores, Carl Overly, Jr., Erin Roberts, and Jacqueline Thompson. Continue reading →
The Chinese language blog ideochina.com – 思想中国 – has an article about the troubles of the elections-based system of government (what may be termed “eklogocracy”). Among other ideas for reform, the article mentions proposals involving sortition.
Abstract:
In the past quarter of the century，democracy has won the day，with most countries in the world claiming themselves to be democracies. However， the glory is fleeting. In exactly the same period of time， the advancing step of western democracy starts faltering， and its theory is being challenged in an unprecedented way. The idol of democracy is entering into twilight， surrounded by more and more pessimistic views. Theorists of democracy have now started to reflect on the inherent deficiencies of representational democracy， rethink electoral democracy， and seek to return to real democracy by exploring various institutions that can involve the participation of the populace.
The author appears to be an Equality-by-Lot reader.
That makes the second Spitz (for outstanding work in democratic theory) to a Sortinista in three years, following John McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy in 2013.
Filed under: Academia, Books, Sortition | Comments Off on News: Democratic Reason wins 2015 Spitz Prize for work in democratic theory
Two 45-member Citizens’ Assembly Pilot Projects will each be held over two weekends, in Sheffield on 17-18 October and 7-8 November, and in Southampton on 24-25 October and 14-15 November.
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.
Ray Fisman, a Boston University economist, and Daniel Markovits from Yale Law School write in Slate about “The distributional preferences of an elite”, a study they recently published in Science magazine. In the final paragraphs they say:
Elites’ preferences matter. The American elite overwhelmingly dominates both campaign finance and political lobbying, and American policymakers themselves come overwhelmingly from elite circles—the powerbroker Yale Law alumni mentioned above represent just the tip of a vast iceberg.
Our results thus shine a revealing light on American politics and policy. They suggest that the policy response to rising economic inequality lags so far behind the preferences of ordinary Americans for the simple reason that the elites who make policy—regardless of political party—just don’t care much about equality. Hemingway’s illusory but widely shared view that the only thing that separates the rich from the rest is their money thus disguises a central pathology of American public life. When American government undemocratically underdelivers economic equality, the cause is less party than caste.
Democracy gives the mass of citizens a path for protest when the gap between ordinary views and a closed rank of elite opinion grows too great. The populist insurgencies that increasingly dominate the contests to select both the Republican and Democratic candidates in the upcoming presidential election show the protest path in action. Elites—in both parties—remain baffled by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’ appeal; and they prayerfully insist that both campaigns will soon fade away. Our study suggests a different interpretation, however. These bipartisan disruptions of elite political control are no flash in the pan, or flings born of summer silliness. They are early skirmishes in a coming class war.
This topic came up recently. Here is the most thorough discussion of this matter in the primary sources that I am aware of. Aristotle is describing here (Politics, 1317a-1318a) what he considers as the conventional wisdom of his time:
And for this inquiry we must take into view all the features that are popular and that are thought to go with democracies; for it comes about from combinations of these that the kinds of democracy are formed, and that there are different democracies and more than one sort. In fact there are two causes for there being several kinds of democracy, first the one stated before, the fact that the populations are different （for we find one multitude engaged in agriculture and another consisting of handicraftsmen and day-laborers, and when the first of these is added to the second and again the third to both of them it not only makes a difference in that the quality of the democracy becomes better or worse but also by its becoming different in kind）; and the second cause is the one about which we now speak. For the institutions that go with democracies and seem to be appropriate to this form of constitution make the democracies different by their combinations; for one form of democracy will be accompanied by fewer, another by more, and another by all of them. And it is serviceable to ascertain each of them both for the purpose of instituting whichever of these kinds of democracy one happens to wish and for the purpose of amending existing ones. For people setting up constitutions seek to collect together all the features appropriate to their fundamental principle, but in so doing they make a mistake, as has been said before in the passage dealing with the causes of the destruction and the preservation of constitutions. And now let us state the postulates, the ethical characters and the aims of the various forms of democracy. Continue reading →
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Equality by lot 