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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

We should elect the house (or senate, one or the other) by randomly drawing a large number of people from the population. See how easy it is to corrupt 1000-2000 randomly selected folks who, for the most part, have an ingrained set of morals. It'd be like a jury for the government and they'd easily be able to roadblock the vast majority of bullshit that goes on.

We could even let them decide who the president is.

Alternatively, we could have it set up so our representatives give up most of their rights to privacy. Their whereabouts, communications/conversations (of all kinds) should be monitored and made public after a short period of time. It could be considered a price they have to pay to be in public office, and we could pay them a lot more so that good people would be willing to do this.

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The problem with this is that you end up trading corruption for incompetence and uncertainty.

Suppose we pick elected officials at random. OK, in the first round we get a bunch of reasonable people and they do a bunch of reasonable stuff. In the second round, maybe the same thing, except that they have different ideas from their predecessors so they end up repealing all the programs and replacing them with still reasonable but quite different ones. Businesses can't plan anything because they don't know what the regulatory environment will look like the year after the election. The churn strains our already-difficult ties with countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia when the things the Nth Congress promised get repudiated by the N+1th Congress which is comprised of entirely different people.

Then, sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family, or "libertarians" and peace activists who very suddenly disband the entire U.S. military, or nationalist religious fundamentalists who decide to declare war on "Muslims" or drop a nuclear bomb on somebody with the ability to strike back.

The thing about politics is that you actually do want professionals running the country. You want people with formal training who know what they're doing. You just have to make sure they're representing us and not somebody else.

There is real historical experience with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition -- and AFAIK Athens wasn't worse-governed than the U.S. over its period of democracy. (It's true the scale is different.) Thinking we could just swap it in for elections seems silly, yes, but it could serve as part of a package of real reform.

Athens also had a much different population than we do and not everyone was eligible to be chosen. And I don't think it would go over well today to limit the pool of candidates to exclude those who are nominally unqualified for statecraft.

One great way around this is to alternate rounds of sortition with rounds of election:

- You pick 1000 random people to serve as the House of Representatives. - They elect 100 people from among themselves to serve as the Senate. - You randomly divide them into 10 person committees.

If you have enough rounds, there are some great effects:

- The election means that only competent or representative people make it through to the next round. - The sortition makes it so that no one individual or small group is likely to make it all the way to the top.

sooner or later, random chance produces a majority coalition consisting of people who are willing to horse trade for corrupt programs that specifically benefit their own friends and family

Something that a "professional" would never do, and something that is much likelier to happen by randomly selecting 1000-2000 people, than if people are able to work towards it. It clearly would be nuts to take away the ability to deliberately commandeer a country and swapping it with the so much higher risk of that happening randomly.

Elected officials have at least some accountability to the voters. If they do anything sufficiently bad then they don't get reelected, and at any given time there are a majority of elected officials who don't intend to immediately retire and therefore care about being reelected. If you select Congress at random then there is absolutely no accountability whatsoever. They can come in and collude with a majority of the other randomly selected people to each put as much of the country's wealth into their own pockets and the pockets of their friends and family as they can and then retire rich to the south of France. The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever.

The existing system isn't one with no accountability, it's one with accountability to the people who can drive election outcomes. The problem is that in a functioning system that is only the citizens, but in the current system it's also the campaign donors. That is a problem, but you can't solve it by eliminating all accountability whatsoever.

Elected officials have at least some accountability to the voters. If they do anything sufficiently bad then they don't get reelected

If I say "pay me 50 dollars, and I will give you X", and then you pay me and I just grin at you, and the WORST you can do to me is to say "fine, then we won't do that again", that's not accountability.

The only thing preventing that would be their own consciences, which may work once or twice but is guaranteed not to work forever.

Their own consciences AND each other. "Each other" meaning a heterogenous group of people from all walks of life, instead of mostly their buddies and "the people doing the same stuff for a different team", which is so much weaker a check. Ever been where thousands or ten thousands of people are? No cameras, no cops? At least where I am those tend to be peaceful and rather moral on average. Small groups of friends however, they can be real dicks. Split them up and mix them with people they don't know that well, or at all, and they will behave much better. Such is the nature of criminal conspiracy, it doesn't like randomness and shooting from the hip.

Don't ask me about the specific implementation details, but I think there should be more "actual accountability", and I don't see why that wouldn't be applicable to "random politicians" as well. For starters, if everybody could theoretically get "drafted" for this tomorrow, many people would make it much more of their business to pay attention to what is going on, to what others are doing in that capacity. That in itself could have a positive effect.

And maybe it could start small, with a few hundred random people who have somewhat of an influence. And if that goes well, do more of that. A/B testing, you know? Because if we're just doing Gedankenexperimente, I don't see why how I experienced the world so far, namely that people in general are good even when they might be a bit lame, and people who want power are usually compensating and sport at best some kind of genius of mediocrity, shouldn't win over your concerns.

>If I say "pay me 50 dollars, and I will give you X", and then you pay me and I just grin at you, and the WORST you can do to me is to say "fine, then we won't do that again", that's not accountability.

Sure it is. You're presumably selling X to me at a profit, so if you screw me now, you're losing all of your future profits, which keeps you honest when that's worth more to you than the benefit of screwing me out of $50 once. Obviously that only works in cases where we're talking about repeat players, but it's still miles away from nothing.

>Their own consciences AND each other.

What do you think that buys you?

Here is how this would play out. A hundred honest people go to Washington. Someone suggests that they get $250,000 for their local community center. That's nothing out of the federal budget, and it seems like a worthy cause, so OK. Somebody else is a teacher and wants a million dollars for her school, same deal.

Soon people are exchanging support for each others' "worthy" pet causes. Somebody's pet cause is a sister who needs a heart transplant. It sure would be nice to get a heart transplant for everybody who needs one, though it turns out there just aren't enough donor hearts for that. But we can make an exception for this guy's sister, can't we? We need his vote to get the community center and the school money.

Eventually somebody asks for something that costs a billion dollars instead of a million and some people have reservations about spending that much on something that smells like favoritism, but the first one will be something sympathetic like a billion dollars for cancer research (which so happens to target the rare type of cancer that the bill's sponsor has). So that one gets the green light because who is going to tell a cancer patient you won't fund cancer research? And once you set the precedent for a billion dollar personal project the next thing you know federal laws are being passed which give a regulatory advantage to the company of the chosen one who works in that industry and major government contracts are being awarded on the basis of "I don't trust these low bidders I've never met but I know this guy."

Yay, more FUD. But even your worst examples seem peanuts compared to something like the Iraq War.

Almost anything will seem like peanuts compared to a war.

You're just misunderstanding what I'm arguing: It isn't that corruption isn't a problem, it's that sortition isn't a solution.

Two key problems with the current system:

1) The financial sector of the economy attracts away many of America's smartest and most charismatic, while simultaneously making a career in public service, especially by comparison, very unattractive for this valuable group. Thus an escape to lucrative lobbying (and gov't contracting) positions becomes the only economic redemption for those experiencing such injustice (as they might call it).

2) There is a school of thought that believes, and aims to show, that gov't can't do anything well. In the U.S., a significant proportion of the time, people who espouse this attitude hold powerful offices -- it's no surprise, then, that they don't instil in their subordinates a sense of civic responsibility and pride. Neither should it be surprising that they behave cynically.

I'd support a house of congress (or part of either or both existing houses) picked via sortition (with a filter for non felon, etc). Ancient Athens actually used this for the very reason of being harder to compromise. The problem with competitive elections for power is the people they attract.

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