University of Pennsylvania Prof Thinks We Should Choose Political Leaders by Lottery
“Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.”
You may have seen this headline floating around on Twitter.
This is a real article in the New York Times. pic.twitter.com/Wjb0zuUUUB
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 22, 2023
Campus Reform reports:
Ivy League Prof: Bad people get elected, so let’s choose our leaders by lottery instead
An Ivy League professor said in an Aug. 21 op-ed that the United States should do away with elections and switch to a lottery system.
Adam Grant, a Professor of both Management and Psychology at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, opined that elections favor people with “dark triad” personality traits and social privilege. He claimed a lottery system would select better leaders, and fix other concerns like election integrity.
The piece was originally entitled “Elections are Bad for Democracy.”
However, the title of the article changed 12 hours after it was published, to “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.”
”On the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows,” Grant began. “Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.”
Professor Grant then proposed a lottery pool as the alternative selection method. Grant compared the potential lottery election to both ancient Athenian democracy and the NBA draft.
The professor declared that dispatching elections would have several advantages. It would help get rid of privilege in politics; it would give a fair shot to those “not tall enough or male enough to win”; it would also “open the door to people who aren’t connected or wealthy enough to run.”
Furthermore, the lottery system, or sortition, would increase confidence in elections. “[N]o voting also means no boundaries to gerrymander and no Electoral College to dispute,” he said. Instead of debating the accuracy of vote counts, the public could just watch their potential leader get chosen live through the lottery pool.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
I remember a comment attributed to William F. Buckley, Jr., that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than 100 professors from Harvard. This proposal is something like that. I should hasten to add, I don’t it’s a good idea.
IFF* the lottery is entirely random and the people serve whether they want to or not.
(* If and only if.)
It might work if we actually still had phone books. (Dragoon two citizens into the job – one (blindfolded) randomly flips the phone book to a page, and the other (also blindfolded) drops his finger onto that page somewhere. Then you pick for the next position.
On the one hand, people chosen this way won’t be worse than the ones we have now.
On the other hand, a national lottery sounds much easier to fix than the current system.
Ha ha ha ha ha! Sure.
Mastermind of lottery fraud admits he rigged jackpots
Now imagine if the government did that. Who would prosecute it?
The same people prosecuting Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, of course.
Democracy is a threat to democracy? Is that what he’s saying? Asking for a friend …
De Tocqueville did say that freedom was threatened by democracy. Because he understood “democracy” in its right definition (as did the Founders) of rule by the passions of the 50%+1 mobs.
Progressives have so muddled language that nothing makes sense.
(Sighh) The Constitution creates the United States of America as a republic, with representative democratically elected but decisions of policy decided on by those representatives. I am including the President as one such representative.
Happy birthday 1984, Mr. grant. your original title will go down in the lexicon with the better known “Ignorance is strength” and “War is peace”.
I wish we could give the NY Times the Bud Light treatment.
This, from a moron whose colleagues eagerly and deliberately sent Vegetable Fetterman to the Senate.
Sure, let’s select the incompetent as well as the sociopathic to office. Then the swampmasters can have their hands up ALL their asses, just like they do now with Biden, AOC, Feinstein, Fetterman, and Swalwell.
We basically do this for juries.
And juries aren’t letting shoplifters and physical assailants go free — the elected D.A.’s are.
Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity.
Ummm, no, they aren’t. So, everything you say after that is going to be naive or dishonest.
On the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows
Why is that a bad thing? There probably is a tipping point where it is a bad thing, but it’s actually a pretty good trait to not trust people with power over your life. Because they’re human. It’s why the Founders wrote the Constitution as they did – to limit the power and to provide divided power so the people could easily rein in abuses.
Having said all that, I tend to agree with him – because the people are so progressively indoctrinated now, that their voting is no longer effective at keeping the national gov’t under control. Once you lose the character of “a moral and religious people” and they start voting “themselves largesse from the public treasury” your republic will be no more. You may as well try unique forms of authoritarianism at that point. (Or, of course, you can try and convert the people back to the principles of those early Americans.)
How about university professors? That’d be good for the gander.
This is effectively a republication of an old joke by author Robert Heinlein:
The best way to choose political leaders is by random lot, after eliminating anyone who wants the job.
Three other corollaries to chosing political leaders by lottery:
1) Chose college presidents by lottery.
2) Chose college deans by lottery.
3) Award college professors tenure by lottery.