The following two letters were sent by postal mail to President Obama at the beginning of his first term as President of the US.
Until now no response.
First letter:
January 23 2009
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
The reason why I am contacting you is, that I would like to bring to your attention the following important issue (at least in my opinion). The issue is about the establishment of a World Parliament by means of the principle of Lottocracy. The idea of Lottocracy is described in detail in the chapter: A Concept for Government in the book: The World Solution for World Problems. However, the text of that chapter is also available on my homepage. You can go directly to:
The book (ISBN 90-9002592-8) has originally been published as a hard copy and is, for example, available in The Library of Congress in Washington DC. Continue reading →
Herodotus reported about a people that had the custom (like many animals living in tribes) to kill a person who is ill. ‘Naturally’, he comments, ‘the unfortunate man protests that nothing is wrong with him but to no avail’. In such a case, a veto-right, the right of one person in a small scale group being able to torpedo a general decision, would be life-saving (for the man). It would even be advantageous to the group in Summum Bonum fashion. In our case, things are different. When 20 shipwrecked people in a lifeboat should agree with a proposal to drill a hole in the boat except one sane person, who means to survive, the existence of a veto right, then, might well save the lot. This example more or less reflects our state of affairs. But there are other reflections possible.
First of all, one wise man in a boat-load of 20 may compare to a ratio of 100 in the 5 billion, or even to 3 in the 1000 governors.
Secondly, the proposal and vote to drill a hole, can easily be made into the opposite proposal ‘not’ to drill such hole. The veto of a sane man for the first, could be compared to the veto of a crank, the one saving lives, the other destroying life. When you veto the ‘not’ drilling, you in fact drill. Continue reading →
It is a long standing tradition to deride sortition for putting in power unqualified people. The critics of sortition interviewed by Kevin Hartnett carry this tradition to the present.
Whether it is because the average person is incorrigibly incompetent, or just because they are inexperienced, the bottom line is the same: you just cannot hand power to the average person and expect good government. Socrates put it this way:
[N]o one would care to apply [sortition] in selecting a pilot or a flute-player or in any similar case, where a mistake would be far less disastrous than in matters political.
The straightforward argument is that the unqualified would simply make poor decisions:
There are ways in which we want our elected officials to look like us and then there are other ways in which we want them to be better than us. We actively try to select for some skills and talents when we choose politicians. (Susan Stokes, professor of political science at Yale University)
Kevin Hartnett has an article about sortition in the Boston Globe “Ideas” section.
The performance of our elected officials has led many people to wonder whether we might as well just pluck people at random and send them to Washington. For a small but fervent group of political philosophers, that’s not a joke—it’s a serious idea.
The piece focuses mainly on the ideas of Alexander Guerrero, who is a professor at the department of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, and who, we learn, has an upcoming book on sortition called “The Lottocratic Alternative”. Others mentioned as proposing various ways to use chance in politics are Richard Thaler, and Peter Stone (“a lecturer in political science at Trinity College in Dublin and contributor to Equality by Lot, a blog about lottocratic politics”) and Scott Wentland. Continue reading →
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.
Take me down to the paradise city Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty Oh won’t you please take me home
Guns ‘N Roses
This fascinating book is unique amongst radical theories of democracy in that it’s written by a clinical psychologist with a particular interest in psychopathology – as such his primary emphasis is on the (two-way) relationship between political systems and character. Whereas most books focus on the institutional level, Dr. Robbins constantly reminds us that entities like ‘governments’ and ‘nations’ are merely abstractions, by adding (in parentheses) ‘person or persons in power’ every time he uses the word ‘government’. History is ‘nothing but a vast battlefield after the battle is over – a mountain of the corpses of men, women, and children from around the world and across time who have been slaughtered to satisfy the warriors in their quest for blood and glory’ (p.229). Political leaders are subjected to psychoanalytic scrutiny and are (with the exception of a small number of Athenian statesmen) mostly diagnosed in terms of psychopathy – not just the obvious cases (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) or even the usual suspects (Alexander of Macedon, Genghis Kahn, Napoleon), but also less extreme examples like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Dr. Robbins explains the development of psychopathy in terms of dysfunctional childrearing and early maternal relationships, so history is, in effect, reduced to the psychiatrist’s couch. Strangely enough (given his idolisation of Athenian democracy) this explanation is derived from Greek literature, forcing him to conclude that the dysfunctional relationship between mother and son is limited to the Greek aristocracy (p.303). Given that such psychopathic individuals – ‘a special subset of men’ – are fundamentally different from ‘us’ (p.309), then the goal of democracy is not so much ‘power to the people’ as making sure that the bad guys don’t get hold of the reins. Rotation of office (and/or mass participation in government) is not so that we may all, as Aristotle put it, ‘rule and be ruled in turn’ but simply to reduce the likelihood of handing power to a psychopath.
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.
As Steven M. Davidoff, a professor at the Michael E. Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University, reminds his readers, legal bribery is endemic to elections-based systems (admittedly, he probably would not phrase it this way).
Of course, this arrangement in which retired (or on-leave) politicians are awarded large sums of money by private interests is very convenient to both politicians and powerful private interests. This fact makes it unlikely that this phenomenon would be addressed effectively in a system dominated by the interests of those groups, despite the obvious conflicts of interests involved and the despite the equivalence for-all-intents-and-purposes of the activities involved to acts of illegal bribery.
Ideologically, as well, electoralism makes it natural for politicians to claim that their monetary rewards are justified. Just like manufacturers who manage to sell their products to a large number of people and can claim that the popularity of their products is an indication of their high quality, successful politicians can claim that the fact that the were elected is evidence of their high qualifications. It is only fair, then, according to the rules of the free market, that they are rewarded handsomely for providing their skills, once they are not in office, to private employers. Any mechanisms aiming to limit the ability of former politicians to sell their skills would not only be unfair to those politicians but would also be a disincentive for highly skilled individuals to entering politics and using those skills in the public interest. Prof. Davidoff sums up this outlook in the last paragraph of his article:
I can’t begrudge politicians making money after years of relatively low-paid public service.
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?
Adam Cronkright
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Equality by lot 