Congrats on the end of an informative, story-filled, and much needed book! It is definitely my North Star for how sortition works, and has elevated my thinking about how democracy could look in the 21st century.
Ahh... There's the rub. The reason I did this on Substack is because I wasn't able to convince a literary agent or a publisher to print it. i did a bunch more refinement in this process, and will make yet another attempt to find an agent or publisher... and if that still fails, I will likely self-publish (as a last resort). I think a key problem is that no American acquisition agents have ever heard of the subject matter.
Impressive work. However, I fear a subversion of the selection mechanism(s) for "random" mini-publics, as when interest groups slowly took over low-visibility positions like small town school committees. Perhaps I didn't pay enough attention to that part (if there was one).
To your point, the goal of special interest groups would be to subvert the random selection process in their favor. That is indeed something that must be taken very seriously.
Terry has suggested that on a national and/or state level, a randomly-selected panel would be tasked with creating rules for fairness in the random selection process, and another randomly-selected panel would be tasked with enforcing those rules.
The problem of special interests capturing the random selection process that you mention is akin to gerrymandering today, where elected "representatives" (controlled by special interest groups) pick their voters, versus voters picking their representatives.
I think this is the most important paragraph of the book:
> The only way to facilitate informed decision-making on the thousands of decisions that must be made in society is to delegate the task to subsets of the people. The only way to also protect political equality is to have that subset regularly rotated with equal chance. And, the only way to have those decisions reflect the interests and informed judgment of the population as a whole (rather than of an elite) is to have those subsets be randomly selected representative samples.
Congrats on the end of an informative, story-filled, and much needed book! It is definitely my North Star for how sortition works, and has elevated my thinking about how democracy could look in the 21st century.
If the book is complete, when can we expect publication?
Ahh... There's the rub. The reason I did this on Substack is because I wasn't able to convince a literary agent or a publisher to print it. i did a bunch more refinement in this process, and will make yet another attempt to find an agent or publisher... and if that still fails, I will likely self-publish (as a last resort). I think a key problem is that no American acquisition agents have ever heard of the subject matter.
I think self-publishing may need to happen. I’ll help if I can. This needs to get out.
giving up the right to vote..
no, replacing the..
no, how about
UPGRADING your right
Impressive work. However, I fear a subversion of the selection mechanism(s) for "random" mini-publics, as when interest groups slowly took over low-visibility positions like small town school committees. Perhaps I didn't pay enough attention to that part (if there was one).
To your point, the goal of special interest groups would be to subvert the random selection process in their favor. That is indeed something that must be taken very seriously.
Terry has suggested that on a national and/or state level, a randomly-selected panel would be tasked with creating rules for fairness in the random selection process, and another randomly-selected panel would be tasked with enforcing those rules.
The problem of special interests capturing the random selection process that you mention is akin to gerrymandering today, where elected "representatives" (controlled by special interest groups) pick their voters, versus voters picking their representatives.
I think this is the most important paragraph of the book:
> The only way to facilitate informed decision-making on the thousands of decisions that must be made in society is to delegate the task to subsets of the people. The only way to also protect political equality is to have that subset regularly rotated with equal chance. And, the only way to have those decisions reflect the interests and informed judgment of the population as a whole (rather than of an elite) is to have those subsets be randomly selected representative samples.