The Powerball Revolution

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: One day, not long ago, I went to visit the Lawrenceville School just outside Princeton, New Jersey, a very old, prestigious private school, leafy campus, Gothic this and that. I asked one of their deans could I come and meet with some students? She said yes, Does everyone have a piece of paper and pen? The dean put together a group of twenty kids. We met in a conference room looking out on the campus lawn. On a scale of one at ten, don't put your name on it. I would like you to rank your happiness with the Lawrenceville School's current electoral process.

00:01:00
Speaker 1: Ten is you think it's perfect?

00:01:02
Speaker 2: One is you think it's maybe time to bring in Adam Adam Adam Cronkwright. He was the reason I was there. Okay, hi everyone, thanks for coming. My name is Malcolm Babo, so you as you know, I am a writer and I have a podcast called Revision's History. That's how the afternoon began. I said, I wanted to run an idea by them, an idea field tested by this person. I just met Adam kronkright about talent and chance and how we choose others to lead us. And I would encourage you all to be. If you think I'm crazy, you should say, Malcolm, you're crazy. Maybe this idea could change a lot about what's wrong with the world right now, or maybe not. Revisionist history is about the overlooked and misunderstood. Usually I decide what belongs in either of those categories. This time, I thought I'd just run Adam's idea by the students of Lawrenceville and that them decide. All this had to do with the way they elected their student council. I thought they should call a constitutional convention and start over. There is no right answer or wrong answer, but I want to make a case for something and see how that possibly relates to the way you guys do things here at Lawrenceville. They listened to Adam's idea argued about it for close to two hours. I'll be honest, I didn't think I'd get anywhere. The whole student council was there as well, all people who had profited from the Lawrenceville electoral status quo. And what was wrong with the status quo in theory, not much. Lawrenceville elected its leaders through the perfect democratic system, campaign speeches, open elections. Their constitution might as well have been drawn up by the founding Fathers. For all I know, one of the Founding fathers went to Lawrenceville. But then at the end of the day afternoon, I said, okay, now that I've given you an alternative, how happy are you with what you have? Scale of one to ten. One is totally miserable with the status quo, and ten is delighted. Everything's perfect.

00:03:25
Speaker 1: I want to see your number, rip it off and hand it to me. Open to day.

00:03:36
Speaker 2: As the students handed in their little slips of paper, I glanced at a few. I was taken aback. Lawrenceville had the perfect democratic system, and upon reflection, upon exposure to a little of Adam kronk Write's subversion, there were a lot of students in that room who decided they didn't like it anymore. I told them I'd do an official tally later after I got home. But there's some unhappiness in this room, and if they seem discontented with democracy in the gilded corridors of the Lawrenceville School, I can only imagine what it's like elsewhere. I first ran across Adam Kronkwrte online. I was just rummaging around Google one day, and what he was doing. Struck me is so interesting that I tracked him down cold called him. Are you ever in New York City? This was November. He said yes, he'd be there in February. So he settled on a date and he came to my apartment. Young guy, beard, big backpack, hiking boots. So tell me, actually, before we get into the question, where are you from.

00:04:50
Speaker 3: I'm from just outside of Syracuse, New York. Yeah, so central New York.

00:04:55
Speaker 1: How did you end up in Bolivia?

00:04:57
Speaker 2: Coach of Bamba to be more precise, a mid size city in the mountains of central Bolivia. It turned out to be a long story that starts in Canada, across Lake, Ontario from his home town.

00:05:09
Speaker 3: I remember where I was when I thought of the idea, Like you know, where were you I was. I was outside Victoria Hall, walking on on Queen's campus and it was spring.

00:05:23
Speaker 2: It was two thousand and nine. Adam was finishing college at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He wanted to be a politician. He had, as he puts it, a pretty big hero complex.

00:05:35
Speaker 3: He was save the world and coming to terms with this idea that, like you know, be difficult to get to the heights of power without haveting to make some serious compromises externally internally, and you know, so then I was kind of like, Okay, well what am I going to do? What are we going to do?

00:05:54
Speaker 2: He began to read history, political science, turned it over in his mind, looking for a big idea.

00:06:00
Speaker 3: This is going to you know, right, all the wrongs. But I wasn't that involved in anything.

00:06:06
Speaker 2: He was more of a dreamer than a doer. Adam graduated. The world was in a financial crisis. Occupy Wall Street was one of the protest movements that grew up in response. There was a tense city of activists in Szubcatti Park in Lower Manhattan. Adam decided to go down to New York and join them. There were working panels and panel discussions, and one speaker in particular stuck with him, an activist from Bolivia who talked about an epic struggle there over water. Adam lived in Subcatti Park for five weeks until everyone was evicted by the NYPD. His experience with Occupy left him frustrated. He understood what they were fighting for, but not how. There was no how in Occupy. They didn't have a plan that seemed like it could actually reform the systems that had failed during the financial crisis. Adam moved to Brooklyn, slept on someone's couch, and all the while kept skyping with his new friend Bolivia, the water activist Marcella Olivella.

00:07:13
Speaker 3: I kind of shared with her that I was feeling a bit burnt out, disillusion from what I was seeing, and she said, well, yeah, I come down to Bolivia and check out social moments there.

00:07:21
Speaker 2: So he did Syracuse to Kingston, to Zuccotti Park to Bolivia. He made his way to coach A Bomba and there he met Marcella's brother, Oscar, who runs a foundation.

00:07:32
Speaker 3: So I was working with them for a while, and then Oscar one day he was in the car and he's asking me, what are you into, you know? And so I started telling him about democratic lotteries and he had never heard of the.

00:07:45
Speaker 2: Concept democratic lotteries. That's Adam's idea, replace elections with lotteries. Adam tells Oscar about it. Oscar says, we could test it in the schools. They sign up a rural elementary school and two high schools, a night school and a regular high school, and Adam sells them on this new way of picking the student council. Anyone who wanted to be in the lottery put their name forward, and then the whole school gathered in the gym to hear the results.

00:08:29
Speaker 3: We wanted something that was very visual that could generate buzz, and so they had some clay pots and we used faba beans as a crop that they grow there. They're kind of the biggest beans you can find, and so we had two colors, green and purple. The students would put fava beans in the pot and they'd cover it with an aguayoun, a traditional cloth, so that it's from there and it was also visually beautiful.

00:08:56
Speaker 2: If there were two hundred students running for eight student council positions, they would put one hundred and ninety two green fava beans in the pot and eight purple ones. Then all the candidates would line up. The kid reaches in reaches under the cloth. Yeah, grabs a bean.

00:09:15
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:09:15
Speaker 1: Do they hold it up?

00:09:16
Speaker 3: If it's purple, they hold it up. If it's purple or green, they hold They're supposed to hold it up so the school can see.

00:09:28
Speaker 2: No campaigning, no speeches or posters, no glad handing, no ballots no recounts. The whole selection was over in twenty minutes. Those who picked out the purple fava beans were on student council. Done. Now, I know that sounds like a crazy idea. You would never go for that, would you? Or would you? Adam KRONKWRIGHTE learned three important things from his work on school lottery in Bolivia. I'm going to call them kronk Right's laws. None of them I think are obvious beforehand, at least they were not obvious to him. First, numbers, as in number of candidates, typically what percentage of the kids want to be part of the lottery.

00:10:28
Speaker 3: It varies by the school. Yeah, it varies by the school. And so at the night high school, you know, these kids often work even on Saturdays, like they got a full schedule, So we would usually get between twenty and thirty students who are volunteering for like twelve spots. Right, So it wasn't a huge, huge turnout. And then at the like rural K through eight school, it was literally like every student that could participate participated in every lottery. And then you know, at another school we worked out later on. It was an urban high school, but in the morning you know there you had at least half of the school.

00:11:10
Speaker 2: After the student council members finished their time in office. Adam always asks a simple question, would you have run if we had done things the old way with campaigns and speeches.

00:11:22
Speaker 3: It's about three quarters who say no right away?

00:11:26
Speaker 1: Why do they say no?

00:11:28
Speaker 3: Well, let's say that nobody would have voted for me. I was new in the school, didn't have a lot of friends. You know, I would not want to run a campaign, you know, and ask people to vote for me.

00:11:39
Speaker 4: You know.

00:11:40
Speaker 3: It's the things that you can kind of guess are impediments.

00:11:44
Speaker 2: They liked serving in office. They just didn't want to run for office. The demands of the campaign were filtering out all kinds of people who would otherwise have been very interested in student council politics. Overwhelmingly those who win the lottery one year in fact run again the next.

00:12:03
Speaker 3: So yeah, they tend to line back up. But when we ask them, you know, it'd be normal elections, would you have done it? The majority of saying now.

00:12:10
Speaker 2: What's interesting is the extent to which running for an office and running an office are two very very different things, and someone may be both capable and interested in running an office, but have no interest in running for That's the first law. In a democracy. Elections are supposed to encourage participation, but they don't. They discourage it. Lotteries encourage participation. Okay, crank write's second law. When you choose your student government by lottery, you see a change in the kinds of things the government actually does. In my high school, the student council basically organized dances, not at Adams schools. In coach of Bamba, at the Night School, for example, the student government tackled all kinds of issues.

00:13:10
Speaker 3: Human trafficking is a big problem there, and so they organized a workshop on human trafficking that had like you know, theatrical production and breakout groups and stuff. They've gotten First aid kits for their schools. The schools don't tend to have them. They've organized educational field trips.

00:13:28
Speaker 2: The student council put together soccer tournaments and poetry competitions. They opened a library.

00:13:34
Speaker 3: School didn't have one, and so they solicited book donations from institutions and DVDs and they were able to get a computer donated from the Ministry of Education and they set it up and they ran it. They also created their own student ID cards because that school didn't have ID cards and didn't have uniforms, and since they went to school at seven pm, the transportation workers didn't believe that there were students since they charged them double. So that was the first thing that they worked on that was like already number one for all the students was we want student ID cards, and so they made their own and distributed those to Adam.

00:14:14
Speaker 2: The crucial thing about that long list of accomplishments was the range of things the students were interested in.

00:14:21
Speaker 3: What do you mean by that? That's a more diverse group. They come from different social circles versus typically, at least in Bolivia. You know, it'll be like a group of friends who runs for election, right, and so have similar perspective on the school and what the school might need and or what they're going to offer to win people's votes, which is typically more the case. And so a group that's brought the book together through lottery. None of the students in the student government know each other prior to that first meeting, and they often have very divergent interests. You know, you'll have you know, jocks and artists and you know, like just kind of the whole gamut.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: The whole gamut. Democracies are supposed to be the best system for ensuring that a whole gamut of interests are represented in government. Kronk Right's second law says that's not true, not if the government is drawn from the same narrow band of society year after year. It's the lottery that gives you a truly representative sample of leaders. After the success of a few experiments, Adam helps set up a nonprofit called Democracy in Practice to work with student governments in Bolivia.

00:15:30
Speaker 3: I can't tell you the number of times that, you know, fresh off of a lottery selection, we have the first couple orientation meetings and my co founder, Raoul and I will come out and we'll be walking together and will be saying, oh, you know, so and so they're going to be a really important part of this team. You know. They present themselves well, they speak well, they're confident, and they don't even finish the term of office.

00:16:00
Speaker 2: This brings us to kronk Right's third law, maybe the most important of all. Nobody knows anything.

00:16:09
Speaker 3: The number of times that we've walked out of those meetings and been worried about a particular student who seemed really unplugged, you know, just kind of close body language, uncomfortable, didn't participate much, and and we say, we've got to work cut out with that student. And it, you know, they within a couple of weeks they figure out what's expected of them, how they can plug in, and by the end of the term they're even voted by their peers. It's like one of the most important members of the team. And so that's an experience we've had over and over again and still kind of get fooled by that. Now, the charisma that that that certain students will have and the confidence that they'll have.

00:16:49
Speaker 2: So the prediction, the mechanism we're using for predicting who will be a good leader, it's just flawed. So you're saying, yeah, yeah, even you, even you sometimes fall into this trap of of thinking that because a kid presents herself well and it's both spoken and charismatic, that she's going to be a good leader.

00:17:13
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's really difficult to counter that bias, right, And obviously not every student who's confident charismatic, you know, has has a big ego and can't work well with others and doesn't show up, you know, we've had. We've had several students who fit that mold, and we're great teammates. But generally it's a lot easier to teach a Shire student or student who's not super popular. It's a lot easier to teach them to overcome those fears and kind of add a few more leadership skills to their skill set. Then it is to to teach some of the more confident, charismatic students to kind of set aside their ego and like be a good member of a team and not try to steal the limelight and listen to others and not dominate conversations.

00:18:06
Speaker 2: Democratic elections are based on the idea that voters are good predictors, that they can look at a slate of candidates and accurately predict who will be the most effective leader.

00:18:16
Speaker 1: That's why we.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: Have campaigns and speeches and debates to help us make that prediction. But in Bolivia, Adam and his team discovered that people are lousy predictors.

00:18:27
Speaker 3: The teachers who often aren't in the meetings are just constantly fooled by, you know, when they come up and say, oh, you know that student, what a great leader you know, and they're not even aware that the rest of the student government's about to kick them out. You know, they've had enough of some of their behavior. And it's one student who got picked in the lottery. And during the lottery I had a teacher turned to me under his breath say, you know that students a dud. You're not going to work out, you know. I found out afterwards he was the one student from his class of thirty five students who had failed the previous year, and he was one of the one of the more kind of outstanding examples that we've had. He just you really loved to work on meaningful projects and be a part of a team.

00:19:15
Speaker 2: Now I know what you're thinking. It's Bolivia. What works for teenagers and coach of Bamba doesn't necessarily work for the rest of us Apples and oranges and all that. Except after being schooled by Adam, I began to see versions of his logic everywhere.

00:19:35
Speaker 5: Hello, this is Michael Loward.

00:19:37
Speaker 2: Nih delighted that you found time to chat with me. I just ran across your papers on peer review and citations and found them absolutely fascinating and they fit very much in a theme I'm exploring in my podcast. This season, so I wanted to chat. Michael Lawer is Deputy Director of Extramural Research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. If I had to make a list of the most important Americans you've never heard of, Flower's in the top ten. He's way way up in what you might call, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, the biomedical deep state. His office hands out around thirty billion dollars a year in research grants to scientists across the United States. Basically, if you walk through any biology or chemistry department, or any medical school or any medical research institute, Lawer's office is what's paying for it. So every year, his office gets eighty thousand grant applications from around the country. They only have money to find about twenty percent of those, so they hold the equivalent of an election. Each of those applications gets assigned to a small group of reviewers. The reviewers vote for the ones they like and throw out the rest. Then those finalists are turned over to a second group of voters.

00:20:58
Speaker 5: The reviewers who are assigned to grant will give a brief presentation about the grant itself and what they thought were the strengths and weaknesses. This is then followed by an open discussion. After the discussion is complete, there is then a scoring.

00:21:14
Speaker 2: So first round is you're throwing out the bottom the bottom half.

00:21:18
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right.

00:21:20
Speaker 2: Second round is you're scoring the remainder. And how what is the the scores on a scale of what to water? How is the score represented?

00:21:28
Speaker 5: This is like golf, So a lower score is better. A score of ten would be perfect. That means that as far as the reviewers are concerned, they can't think of anything better. A score of ninety would represent the absolute worst.

00:21:44
Speaker 2: Those scores are predictions about how good a scientist's proposal is, in exactly the same way that the choices voters make are predictions about how good a leader a candidate will be. Kronkrite's third law says that voters aren't very good.

00:21:58
Speaker 1: At that prediction.

00:22:00
Speaker 2: So Lower wonders, what about the NIH's grant reviewers? Are we any good at it? Does the proposal that got a perfect ten from the voters grant approval time actually end up being the most influential or innovative research. Once it's finished, lawer looks around. He can't find any definitive answer to that question. This peer review process that you've just described has been in place at NIH.

00:22:24
Speaker 3: For how long seventy five years?

00:22:27
Speaker 2: Twenty five years. So we had this situation where we have a process in place for many, many years, seventy five years, which is from an empirical perspective, unexamined.

00:22:39
Speaker 5: Well, that's right, so.

00:22:41
Speaker 2: Lauer says, let's take a look. His method is simple. The standard way that science measures the value of a bit of research is how often it's cited by other scientists in their work. So if I spend five years working on an experiment and no one mentions that experiment again, it would be considered a failure. And if it's mentioned a thousand times, it's considered a home run. So what is there between the score of your grant application and the number of citations your work gets once it's finished.

00:23:17
Speaker 1: I think you know where this is going.

00:23:21
Speaker 5: We did not find a strong correlation between the peer review score and the citation metrics of the subsequently funded grant.

00:23:32
Speaker 2: Now it's worth pointing something out. Flower doesn't go into this thinking that the NAH is going to be subject to Chronkrit's third law. Nobody knows anything after all, lower's not talking about adolescents judging other adolescents. He's talking about distinguished scientists judging the potential of other distinguished scientists.

00:23:53
Speaker 5: We had assumed that we would find a reasonably strong correlation between the peer review score and the grant productivity.

00:24:03
Speaker 2: Really, I had assumed that you went in skeptical No.

00:24:10
Speaker 5: But then again, exactly as I said, if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it research.

00:24:17
Speaker 2: Kronk Wrt's third law applies outside of coach of Bamba. It applies even at the National Institutes of Health, to the process by which billions of dollars of research money is distributed. It's not kronk Wrt's third law. It's kronk Right's universal third law. When Lauer publishes his research, lots of other scientists look at his results and say, if he's right, our electoral system in science is broken. I mean, why bother voting on grants at all. People throughout the scientific community start talking like Adam, start saying, let's just do a lottery. Let the reviewers make the first cut and get rid of the obvious losers, then put the rest in a hat. My favorite article ran in the wallst Journal by two microbiologists, Ferrik Fang and Arturo cost of All entitled taking the Powerball Approach to funding medical research Powerball for goodness Sake with the subtitle winning a government grant is already a crapshoot, Making it official by running a lottery would be an improvement.

00:25:30
Speaker 5: There's a famous line from Nil's board, and also attributed to Yogi Berra, that prediction is very hard, especially about the future. By its very nature, science is unpredictable. And essentially what we are asking scientists to do is to make predictions about something which is itself inherently unpredictable.

00:25:53
Speaker 2: Well so is leadership. Leadership is even more unpredictable than scientific merit, So why do we insist on making predictions about something which is inherently unpredictable? Along these lines, I did something fun two days ago. I went to a to the Lawrenceville School, I got fancy boarding school in New Jersey, and I spoke to a group of kids, seniors and juniors, a random group of kids, but including the student council and student uncil president, and I told them about your work. I describe it to them, and I said, you know at Lawrenceville, you have a very similar situation. This is a pre selected group of highly able people which you use essentially a peer review process to decide who was eligible for the student council. Right, they have a vote, yep. And I said, well, given the fact that doctor Lower's work suggests that we're bad at making those kinds of predictions at the very top, would you consider change in the way you elect your student council and student council president?

00:26:59
Speaker 4: Laughs.

00:27:00
Speaker 2: No. On the contrary, as you'll discover, the students at the Lawrenceville School did not laugh at this idea. Yeah, at all thoughts comments, this is something you'd ever think of trying here? Do you think Bolivia is different than New Jersey? The students at the Lawrenceville School take the argument I brought them very seriously. They have lots of questions. The democratic process at Lawrenceville is steeped in tradition. They're a little leery of leaving the process up to chance, especially for the top student body president.

00:27:43
Speaker 6: You don't want to have to go to a first school meeting and have a president who's a little bit shaky, because the first time you go to school meeting, you're expecting the freshmen to be excited about the school year ahead, and the seniors everyone in between to be excited about the school yearhead. You don't want to have to learn with them.

00:28:00
Speaker 2: The students are crammed into a small conference room. Some sit at a long table, others stand along the walls. The headmaster and one of the schools steens stand by the door. A microphone is passed to whomever wants to speak. This is a student named solet you want.

00:28:16
Speaker 6: To have someone initially who is a figurehead who can immediately be put into a stressful situation of talking to the entire school and basically the entire faculty perform at the high level.

00:28:29
Speaker 2: One of the president's most important functions at Lawrenceville is the school meeting that happens in the auditorium every Thursday morning. Forty five minutes all the students show up. It's a central part of the school culture.

00:28:42
Speaker 7: Hi Am Quinn, I think that a good public speaker is someone who is willing to be vulnerable with the audience, which is also why I think that being a good public speaker and being a sociable, energetic person is really important in being a good leader, because when you're vulnerable on stage like Tay last year wrapped on stage, which was awesome and got us really excited.

00:29:06
Speaker 2: Hey, Lawrenceville's current student body. He's standing at the back of the room. Later, when we chat, I learned he's half Nigerian half Kenyon, grew up in London. I've noticed that we have not heard from the current president student Council. Hold on k for the Tay is the only one in the room wearing a suit. A little bit of his English formality.

00:29:32
Speaker 1: Tell me why you think you were elected?

00:29:34
Speaker 3: What I think?

00:29:35
Speaker 8: I think a large part of why I was elected is the fact that I am someone who has made sure that I am very president on campus. I speak to as many people as possible. I think I'm known for generally being someone who does speak to people and looks to make change and help people.

00:29:50
Speaker 1: Did you really wrap in your speech?

00:29:51
Speaker 8: Yes, so my my closing speech. The person I was running against, he was a phenomenal speaker. He partakes in theaters, so he was, if not as good, he was definitely he's actually I would actually say he's a better public speaker than I was. So I knew that I had.

00:30:06
Speaker 1: All the great public speakers. By the way, do that exactly. They claim that others are better public speech.

00:30:10
Speaker 8: Oh oh no, But genuinely, he is someone who who speaks on stage law. He is a theater kid, so he is he's greater at public speaking. So I knew that he was going to come in essence, all guns blazing and produce a phenomenal speech. So I knew that there was some way in which I had to show that I am a quote unquote fun guy and someone that the student body could relate to. So I decided to go out with a wrap.

00:30:33
Speaker 3: In my closing statement, I.

00:30:36
Speaker 2: Have to say I really liked Day. He's incredibly thoughtful and charismatic. My first thought after talking to him was would I have voted for him? I think I would have. But then I thought, aren't I making the same mistake that Adam kronk Write warned about. Am I unfairly ruling out other students who might be just as capable of being a great student body president. Back when I met with Adam kronk Wright, he talked about this one student at one of his schools in coach Obamba.

00:31:04
Speaker 1: What happened to him?

00:31:06
Speaker 4: Like?

00:31:06
Speaker 1: What happened?

00:31:07
Speaker 2: I really should have played this tape for the Laurens Hill students.

00:31:11
Speaker 3: He just he started off. He looked bored, he looked uncomfortable, you know, just like slouched in his chair, didn't know if he was listening and stuff. The moment that they started to do some of that work, he just would wake up in the meetings basically and start bottom lining things. He said, Oh, I can go, you know, I can go take the letter down to the Mayor's office. I can go do this, I can go do that, and he'd do it. He'd file through, you know, and that sometimes is in short supply when you're working with teenagers, you know. And he really liked to do those types of things and he'd file through. And so then people started to count on him, and they realized they could count on him, and he took on a lot of responsibility.

00:31:55
Speaker 2: Adam CRONKWRD also told me about another student named Richard Knew in school, completely introverted, who then blossomed and turned out to be one of the most effective student council members.

00:32:06
Speaker 3: I remember walking with him after one of the first meetings and I told them, you know, this is your opportunity. Everyone else in the group is looking to you as a leader and he stopped dead in his tracks. You know, he looks at me all confused, and he says, I'm not a leader. I'm not always out front and don't menando like dominating the conversation, you know. And I told them, like, that's not our conception of leadership.

00:32:33
Speaker 5: You know.

00:32:33
Speaker 3: A leader is someone who develops leadership and other people right and works well on the team.

00:32:40
Speaker 2: And I think this is the key, the larger lesson behind Cronkrite's three laws. It isn't just that we're bad at making predictions. It's worse than that. It's that our whole system of prediction is screwed up because we require that our candidates perform for us. Will never get the richards of the world or the student who everyone thought would be a dud. Neither of them could win an election, could they. They'd slouch in their chairs and look bored and uncomfortable. They get blown off the stage, even though both those kids could end up being great leaders in their own right. In that room at Lawrenceville, they were Indian and Korean, and Chinese and African and African American and white American kids. They were from all over. Some were funny, some were serious. Some sounded like they were forty five years old, some seemed very young. They were as varied and idiosyncratic as any group of teenagers anywhere would be. So why when it came to their leader did they cling to a system that ensured that only one type the performer could win. Now, even if you accept those arguments, there's still the problem that a lottery doesn't feel right. If you win an NAH grant under the old system, you get to walk around and say my grant was selected over thousands of others.

00:34:03
Speaker 1: It feels earned.

00:34:05
Speaker 2: If you win an election, you get to say that people chose me, and that people get to say I chose her.

00:34:13
Speaker 4: My name's Frankie. And I think another aspect of the sort of arbitrarily picked lottery like it's effect. I think it's worth thinking about its effect on like the students themselves and their kind of response in terms of their lack of control or say over who is decided to be the leader.

00:34:39
Speaker 2: But here's what I think Adam Krunkwright would have said to Frankie. You can't just pay attention to the legitimacy of the end result. You have to pay attention to the legitimacy of the process. I suppose we did this in you know, we chosen a big set of people and then chosen our president by lottery. What percent of American presidents would have been female?

00:35:01
Speaker 1: Fifty?

00:35:03
Speaker 2: So wait, you guys twice I've heard this argument that by in depends on elections, but when it comes to presidents, it seems to be the opposite. Is true that if we had a lottery a, a whole lot of people right now who feel disenfranchised would feel enfranchised. It was at that point that a sophomore ninged Summer, suggested a hybrid plan, kind of like the Lawrenceville version of the idea that has been floated for the NIH. Have voters make a first cut, then pick the final winners by lottery who has.

00:35:38
Speaker 9: That potential to learn and to grow and is open to other viewpoints, whereas someone who's already stuck in their ways.

00:35:46
Speaker 2: Summer laid out her idea, then stopped, looked around the room. Wait, Summer, don't give up. This is this is I love this, keep going, so walk me through. I'm going to make you dean of students for the day. By the way, the fact that Summer stopped like that while exploring her idea. That's exactly the point of Adam kronk Write's lottery work with students in Bolivia, because the electoral system does not reward the candidate who, midway through explaining her idea during a debate pauses to gather feedback and take the temperature of the room and reflect on whether what she's saying is actually what she wants to say. No, the system rewards the candidate who blunders ahead, convinced of their own brilliance. I want more candidates like Summer keep going. So describe to me how this works. I like this idea a lot.

00:36:36
Speaker 9: So I think the preliminary part, like I said, would be an anonymous procedure, where people could prepare a piece, any piece they wanted, whether it be a project, an essay of video. And then from there I was either thinking that there could be a lottery system from there, because at that point you know that people chosen are ones you're equally interested in representing the community.

00:37:01
Speaker 2: Right, So Summer, we're gonna call us the Summer proposal. So what you're saying is suppose all the students look at these fifty projects, and then you're saying that they would vote on the ones they liked the best. Yes, and then from that pool you would do potentially a lottery. Yes.

00:37:22
Speaker 8: Yes, love this idea.

00:37:27
Speaker 2: Now that they had thought about their electoral system and talked about the alternatives, how happy were they with the status quo?

00:37:35
Speaker 1: I wanted to vote?

00:37:37
Speaker 2: I want to show up hands. Scale of one to ten. Ten meant happy, one meant disillusion.

00:37:42
Speaker 1: What should it be?

00:37:43
Speaker 2: Hold? What should it be? Because I'm gonna let you know, and I'm going to hold you to this. And I got them to agree that six should be the threshold. Anything less than six, anything less than that, and they should consider calling their own constitutional convention and rewriting the rules.

00:37:59
Speaker 1: Raise your hands, way up, way up, way up, way up. It carries a day, cooks right. I'll let you know. Thank you all very much.

00:38:09
Speaker 2: I went home and counted their average happiness score with the electoral status quo five point three. A tried and tested democratic process honed over generations at one of America's most prestigious private schools. And when you ask the students, even for a moment to think about how well it works, they say, we're not so sure. Oh, I forgot to mention one thing, kind of a big thing. Wait, so do you think colleges should Where I really wanted to push this discussion was maybe colleges should choose their students by lottery.

00:38:49
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot to be said for that. It you liked that idea, Machia, I.

00:38:54
Speaker 2: Think I do. I'm not prepared to give you a full answer on it.

00:38:59
Speaker 1: You guys write down age.

00:39:01
Speaker 2: They were mostly juniors and seniors either on the cusp of the endless college application process or in the middle of it. And selection is the student body president problem times ten. Right, the student runs for a highly coveted position, the university makes its prediction. But if NAA T viewers can't predict the best scientists based on grant proposals, and if voters pass over perfectly good candidates because they slouch in the corner, how on earth can universities pick the best students based on college applications. There are much much bigger fish to fry here.

00:39:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like it.

00:39:40
Speaker 3: I like the idea a lot.

00:39:41
Speaker 2: Another revolutionary I was suddenly so giddy with excitement that I didn't catch his name. Lanky kid, big head of curly hair. Do you think that the reason you and I think alike. So much is that our hair is similar? I think?

00:39:53
Speaker 1: Sorry exactly, I called.

00:39:57
Speaker 2: For another vote on support for college admission lotteries. Show of hands, Oh most of you? Well, half the revolutionaries are not at the gates Lawrenceville.

00:40:10
Speaker 1: They're inside the gates.

00:40:12
Speaker 2: Next stop for Adam Kronkwright, New Jersey. Revicious History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Lee Mingestu, with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Anna Naime. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Louis Scara, mastering by Flawn Williams. Fact checking by Beth Johnson. A special thanks to the Pushkin Crew, Hede Fane, Carly Migliori, Maya Knig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course LFA Jacob Weisberg. Oh and big thanks to the staff and students of the Lawrenceville School for a really fun afternoon. I'm Malcolm Goma. It would have been so much clever if I had had them to have a lottery to decide on whether to have a lottery. That would have been so meta and great. But I missed that opportunity.