I know, and I have read your essay on the subject (along with others encountered prior to that, and earlier study of Athenian democracy). Government-established juries have been used to come up with electoral reform proposals to be subjected to referenda in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario in just the last few years, bypassing the vested interests of officeholders.
Also, the political/legal barriers to replacing elections with juries are immense (e.g. expressive voting, tradition, etc), but do not apply to privately funded juries without binding authority, used for research purposes and to provide a powerful endorsement to the selected candidate(s).
Matthew,
“I’m a bit puzzled why it is rational to bother to vote and irrational to purchase lottery tickets, based on the mathematics. Surely there is a clear, obvious unbiased Bayesian explanation somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced it. . .”
Even a modestly positive expected value lottery probably wouldn’t be worth playing (unless you could insure in such a way as to make it riskless arbitrage) because of risk aversion based on diminishing marginal benefits of wealth. A utilitarian, however, values each unit of welfare produced equally, and so is effectively ‘risk-neutral’ in the voting case.
Robin,
I know, and I have read your essay on the subject (along with others encountered prior to that, and earlier study of Athenian democracy). Government-established juries have been used to come up with electoral reform proposals to be subjected to referenda in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario in just the last few years, bypassing the vested interests of officeholders.
Also, the political/legal barriers to replacing elections with juries are immense (e.g. expressive voting, tradition, etc), but do not apply to privately funded juries without binding authority, used for research purposes and to provide a powerful endorsement to the selected candidate(s).
Matthew,
“I’m a bit puzzled why it is rational to bother to vote and irrational to purchase lottery tickets, based on the mathematics. Surely there is a clear, obvious unbiased Bayesian explanation somewhere, but I seem to have misplaced it. . .”
Even a modestly positive expected value lottery probably wouldn’t be worth playing (unless you could insure in such a way as to make it riskless arbitrage) because of risk aversion based on diminishing marginal benefits of wealth. A utilitarian, however, values each unit of welfare produced equally, and so is effectively ‘risk-neutral’ in the voting case.