Before you get too excited about this just imagine the average line of people at the DMV or the Grocery store and now imagine that those people are in charge of the lives of hundreds of millions. If you think HOAs are bad, you aint seen nothing yet.
The current system of oligarch patronage is bad, but at least it keeps the train mostly on the rails.
But aren't most HOA horror stories based on people who'd been running them for years if not decades, and only end happily when someone replaces those entrenched in power with new people?
But such groups are almost invariably coordinated. In a legislature based on sortition, there will be a percentage of busybodies/ assholes/ opportunists but they'll have a coordination problem, opponents, and term limits acting to restrain them.
Term limits incentivize a deep state exactly one layer removed from those to which the limits apply, as a repository of institutional knowledge about how things actually get done.
This seems rational. We on't have term limits int he US Congress and it doesn't seem any the better for it.
Japan, a heavily bureaucratized country, systematically moves junior and mid-tier staff around in some departments to minimize the possibility of nest-feathering and empire-building, although I would not say it's perfect by a long way.
We do have term limits for positions like the presidency, and what we see is a perpetual power structure one layer removed, in the party system, which effectively chooses who we're permitted to vote for.
Introducing term limits only forces the wealth and power to change it's face periodically. It is addressing a symptom, not the cause.
It's a potentially big problem for sure. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the public education system in some of the Scandinavian countries. From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist. Meaning that, if rich or otherwise elite people want their kids to receive a good education, they need to support the public education facilities their own kid attends. I quite like this idea that everyone is nudged towards helping everyone else, even if they mostly care about their own family and friends.
Similarly in a lottocracy you'd want everyone to be a capable leader when their name is picked from the hat. As the professor I listened to put it, lottocracy makes you think what a democracy really values. Is it about everyone's voice being heard, or is there another goal we should care about more? Not an easy question to answer.
Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw. I just don't think we live in anything resembling that society and I'm not sure whether such a society is possible once you reach a certain population size.
I think it's a nice idea, but I'm not sure how we get from here to there
> Yes, I suppose there exists an egalitarian and well adjusted hypothetical society where we could find good leaders by random draw.
If you can find good leaders by random draw, that means the average citizen is a good leader, which would seem to suggest that the average citizen should be a reasonable an hard-to-dupe judge of good leaders, and therefore that elections also work well.
If elections don't work well to select leaders, that's a pretty good piece of evidence that sortition won't, either.
OTOH, the particular failures of sortition and elections may be different, and using a system where both are used for different veto points might be net less problematic than either alone. Consider a bicameral legislature with one house chosen by elections and the other by sortition, for instance.
(OTOH, there is plenty of solid evidence in comparative government of how to do electoral democracy better and people in the US don't seem too interested in that, which is probably a better focus for immediate reform than relatively untested, on a large scale, ideas about avoiding electoral democracy.)
Bit of a nerd-snipe, but I wonder about the idea of sortition of a set of candidates -- say 200 -- out of a larger voting pool, and then voting for one of the randomly selected candidates.
Then you get "at least approx. top 1%" -- but it's still not necessarily an entrenched elite.
Agreed, I'm not sure if it can be made to work either. I have an inkling of a thought that instead of an egalitarian society being required for lottocracy to work, an egalitarian society can be created using lottocracy. But it's just a thought. Hopefully that book holds something close to an answer, but I'll see :)
The current system of oligarch patronage is bad, but at least it keeps the train mostly on the rails.