694. Does Democracy Really Need Elections?

Stephen Dubner recently served on a criminal jury. Twelve strangers — selected randomly and barely paid — took the job seriously. Afterward, he wondered: why can’t our politics work that way? A growing movement, inspired by Athenian democracy, says it can.

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• 1:47Speaker 00

  The US just held its midterm elections, and as in most midterms, the party of the president got spanked, although the spanking was worse than usual, reflecting widespread dissatisfaction with President Trump and his policies. So now the Democrats will get their turn running Congress until the voters throw them out. That's how our electoral system works. Are you pleased with that system? Many people aren't. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 43% of voters are dissatisfied with both parties. And those are the people who vote. Roughly half of eligible voters don't even bother.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Like every other system that needs reform, whether it's healthcare, or education, or taxes, our electoral system is a thicket that gets thicker by the day, layer upon layer of good intentions, bad intentions, vested interests, collusion and corruption, and good old sludge. A system with those characteristics is inevitably hard to reform, maybe even purposely hard, since the people with the most power to change things generally have the least incentive to change. So where does that leave the rest of us?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  The US voting system is so archaic, is so undemocratic. It is worse than almost every other election system in the world.

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  But I recently came across an idea that represents a radically different kind of election reform. How radical?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  Nobody in America has heard of it yet.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  I stumbled onto this idea because of my own experience with another system that reformers talk about, the jury duty system. I recently served on a criminal jury in Manhattan. The case itself wasn't particularly interesting. It was a low-level drug case, but the way the jury came together to sort things out, well, that was interesting. 12 strangers from different communities, different backgrounds. None of us volunteered to be there. We were paid almost nothing. It was the coldest winter in memory. The only incentives to show up are a sense of duty, let's call it, or maybe a vague fear that you might get a threatening letter someday if you don't. And yet, there we were, listening hard, taking notes, and after a couple of days

• 4:04Speaker 00

  of that, deliberating for several hours, and then casting our votes based on nothing but evidence and conscience. When it was over, I found myself thinking, isn't that how our political bodies are supposed to work? As it turns out, other people have been asking this same question.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  I think the Greeks were right. They knew that you shouldn't give power to people who want power.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Were the Greeks right that you shouldn't give power to people who want power? The radical election reform I'm talking about goes back to Athenian democracy, when most public offices were filled not by election, but by a practice called sortition, from the Latin for drawing lots. In other words, democracy by lottery, which is pretty much how our jury system still operates today.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  I really do believe in the jury.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, could the best election reform be to get rid of elections entirely? We will ask that question and many more, starting now.

• 5:22Speaker 04

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Can you just say your name and what you do?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  I am DJ Hairston, and I am a public defender here in New York City.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Do you swear to tell the truth, hold truth, nothing but the truth?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, I have to. I'm not raising my hand, and I don't have the whole ceremony. There's not a giant guy with a gun looking at me.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  DJ Hairston was one of two public defense lawyers in the case where I recently served on a jury. We convicted his client of selling crack cocaine and heroin on a sidewalk in Greenwich Village.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  So DJ, I have to admit, I was very surprised when, not long after serving on this jury, where we convicted your defendant, I got an email from you saying, I wonder if I have it here. Hang on a second. Yeah, you wrote, "I'm the attorney on the case Mr. Dubner just sat on. I am a huge fan," you wrote, which is nice, although he voted guilty. And I was shocked, honestly, because, and this is naive of me, I didn't think that anyone from the trial itself would either want to or would be even allowed to contact jurors. So what is the protocol there?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  As the judge says after the trial, you're allowed to talk to the attorneys. And I try to talk to, I would talk to every juror that sat on every panel that I had. One, because there's a bit of insecurity, so I'm like, hey, how did I do? Like, what are some things that could make me a better attorney? And two, we don't know what happens in that jury room, just what it's like to be a juror. They rarely ever choose public defenders, surely, for most of these trials. Prosecutors kick us off immediately. I think there's a lot of public defenders out there that sit and they wonder what it's like for someone to be in that jury, and they wonder, are the things they're saying connecting? Are they following the rules? Do the people feel like they have a civic duty?

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Or is everyone just kind of phone in and in? Because the only feedback we ever really get is guilty or not guilty.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  I mean, I've always answered the call for jury duty, but I'd never served on a jury. I'm not going to lie, I was hoping to be dismissed only because of time. But then, when I was chosen for the jury, it was really, DJ, a surprising emotional experience for me. I felt like I passed through a portal where I just felt an overwhelming sense of civic duty. I don't know how else to say it.

• 8:06Speaker 03

  I always worry whether people are just apathetic and going through the motions. That makes me feel really good that you felt a duty.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  I definitely did, and it really was humbling, even though it struck me as obvious from the outset that it was a fairly low-level drug case. I still felt like the defendant, it's high stakes for him, I just felt like, I felt saddened that this defendant had had so many [BLEEP] things happen in his life to have brought him to this place. And there were many parts that were not pleasant or comfortable. The biggest one is just knowing that I played one-twelfth of a part of sending someone to prison, even though I firmly believe that he broke the law and that he should be in prison, but two things can be true at once.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Jury selection, sometimes to my chagrin, is can you follow the instructions? Can you put a lot of those emotions of being a human to the side and judge the facts as they are? I think part of my job is to tell my client's story and to present that to the jury.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Were you surprised that your client was convicted?

• 9:21Speaker 03

  By the time you guys came back in the courtroom, we kind of knew what it was.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Even though we didn't deliberate for very long, I felt like it worked very well in that

• 9:35Speaker 00

  There was not unanimous consensus on all counts from the outset. And I felt like collectively, the 12 of us who didn't know each other and may have very little in common, other than that we live in the proper jurisdiction. And we agreed to take this seriously. What really moved me was that everybody did take it seriously. I have to say, it was with a pretty heavy heart that I and the rest of the people raised their hand ultimately to convict on all three charges. I don't think anybody took any joy in it. You know, I felt that everybody was so energetic about surrendering their individuality to the common cause, which is, I here am not important.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  My voice is one of 12. Let me try to make it gel in a way that's doing the best thing that we can do in a difficult situation.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Where were some of the things that made you feel that way?

• 10:31Speaker 00

  One of the jurors who was advocating for guilty from the outset on all charges, he was a little bit of a mansplainer when some of the jurors raised some objections early on or just questions. His tone was dismissive. Oh, come on. We know what we saw. Come on, we know what's going on here. Come on. But I will say this, by the end, even that guy wasn't triumphant. And so it made me feel that the jury, at least someone I served on, was a rare example in our current era where people from very different backgrounds get together with a common goal and are able to really row in the same direction. And it gave me hope.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  It kind of made me wish that that sort of coming together of strangers for a common cause could be practiced much, much more frequently and aggressively, like in Washington, DC, for instance.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, that would be a site of people in DC putting their individualism aside.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  There is, in fact, a small but growing movement of people who do believe that we should choose our lawmakers by sortition, by random selection, the way we choose our juries. These are often called citizens assemblies, and they come together to deliberate on public policy. Their decisions typically aren't binding. They're more of an advising body than a lawmaking body. But some advocates of sortition want to go much further. Today, we will hear from two of them. Here's one.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  I'm Ellen Landemore, and I'm a professor of political science. I teach political theory at Yale University.

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  Are you, I don't know quite how to say this, the world's foremost advocate of citizen assemblies at the moment?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  One of them, I would say. I think we're quite a few now, so I don't know if I'm the foremost, but I am one of them, yes.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  And here is another sortition advocate.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  My name's Terry Baricius.

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  Baricius is from Burlington, Vermont.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I worked at a food club for many years, and then I got elected to the city council, actually along with Bernie Sanders. And then I got elected to the state legislature, and then I worked for organization Fairvote, working on election reform. I've had a lot of just, not menial jobs, but low-paid jobs. I only survive because my wife is a teacher. I'm retired now, and I just published this book.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Baricius's book is called Democracy Without Politicians. Ellen Landemore recently published a book called Politics Without Politicians. So you get the idea.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I refer to myself as a recovering politician.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  Recovering, why do you use that phrase?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Because it's like an addiction. The ego thrust, people enjoy it more than they should.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  So persuade me that you are indeed recovering or recovered?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  I'm in recovery. I was a founder of three different political parties. I was a founder of the Labour Party, of the Citizens Party with Barry Commoner, and in Vermont, the Vermont Progressive Party. But once I discovered sortition, it's like, we're never going to get there by competitive partisan elections. They're just primed to stoke fear and hate and partisanship.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Primed to stoke fear and hate and partisanship. In your view, what is the mechanism by which electoral politics do that?

• 13:52Speaker 01

  It's the natural incentives. It's a competitive system. People who are willing to lie and who are narcissistic have a distinct advantage. If you had an election in a small community where everybody knew everybody else, elections can work. But once you get where most of the people voting have very little information, and quite frankly, if it's a huge vote, there's no incentive to actually become well-informed because your one vote isn't going to break a tie. So you just vote because it feels important. Therefore, almost all voters are very ill-informed. Candidates, it's not that they're evil. To win elections, there's things that you should do.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And stoking fear and hate is a very effective campaign tool.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  You mentioned a few minutes ago that when I discovered sortition, you said, can you bring us back to that moment?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  After I left elective office and I worked for Fairvote, working on election reform, I thought we just needed to fix elections. And in that role, I was invited to give testimony to a citizens' assembly in British Columbia. They had a problem with their elections, and they'd set up a citizens' assembly to develop a new election system. It was very odd. It was not like any legislature. It was one man and one woman from every legislative district selected by random lottery. They didn't have any hidden agendas. It was everyday people, substitute teacher, a cattle rancher, all kinds of jobs. By the end of it, I said, wait a second, this is really government by the people. In fact, this is what democracy looks like. And from that moment on, that was 2004, the focus of my political work switched from

• 15:29Speaker 01

  election reform to sortition.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  You are essentially advocating the abolition of elections. Is that the case?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Eventually. I think that that may never be fully achieved, but I want huge decisions that are deeply influential. Housing, healthcare, climate change, taxes, military spending, war and not war, those kinds of decisions I want out of the hands of politicians.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  Who are your allies in this sortition cause? And I'm also curious to know who may think you're a total idiot.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  When I talk to people about sortition who have never heard of it before, when I first mentioned the idea of randomly selected people making laws, and they sort of laugh, I talk about it for like another two minutes, almost everybody starts nodding at, yeah, politicians are really the problem. The British Columbia Citizens Assembly was so eye-opening. For months, they would spend their weekends talking to experts and deliberating. And later on in the process, they had become more competent than any elected legislature in the world, I believe.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  If you're not representatives in the way you think and approach problems, you're unlikely to generate smart decisions.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Ellen Landemore again.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  If you put enough people selected at random, you get all kinds of perspectives on a social political issue that you don't necessarily get in a select group of the few who've been typically trained in the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, experience only the world through a limited prism.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  I wanted to find some terms. Let's start with a citizens' assembly. What is it?

• 17:11Speaker 02

  It's my definition. I'm sure there are others out there, but it's a very large group of people. I would say at the minimum 100, up to, you know, maybe 500, 1,000, that are convened to deliberate about a policy issue for a sustained period of time, typically a few weekends, distributed over a few months. They get to deliberate in small groups, in plenarys. They get to first go through an education phase, then a deliberation phase, and then a decision phase. I forgot to mention that these people are selected by lot. It's very important.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  How did you become interested in and then enthusiastic about citizens assemblies and sortition?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  I started as a philosophy student. I was really not interested in politics at all. If anything, I had an aversion to it. But I started with this question of moral choice. How do I make choices that are moral? Why should I? That led me to the question of collective choices and how can we maximize the chances of making the right choice politically as a group?

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Talk a bit about the political system that you grew up within and did you find it wanting from the outset?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  I don't think I had a political consciousness until very, very late. I grew up in France. The presidents were Mitterrand and then Chirac and then slew of others like Sarkozy. I took it for granted in many ways.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Took it for granted, meaning this is the way it is, so it has to be this way.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  There's no alternative. It's the rough end of my youth, like economically, there is no alternative. Politically, there is no alternative. I just bought it, a very well behaved, good student who deferred to authorities. It took a lot for me to question the system. In fact, it took the personal crisis of failing in that system. I am a product of the French meritocratic system. After my baccalaureate, I went to a classe prépa, a preparatory class for our Grand Ecole, the Ivy League equivalent. I spent two years studying the classics and reading a lot and taking a ton of exams. And then I passed the examination and I made it into the Ecole Normale Supérieure. And I thought I had it made.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Then there was this other exam that I wanted to take and I had to take if I wanted to pursue research later on called the aggregation. You're locked up in a room for seven hours and you're given a topic like the ego or can you want the impossible? These are the two I got when I went to the oral examination. And then you deliver a 40 minute lecture in this grand amphitheater in front of four stern looking eminent professors. And I failed, I failed, not once, not twice, but three times. It was the biggest failure of my life. I had to reconsider a lot of things that I had taken for granted, but I decided I couldn't stay. I was so humiliated. So luckily through the Ecole Normale Supérieure, there were these partnerships between universities.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  So I begged to be sent to Harvard because I had spent some time in the US when I was 16 and I had always wanted to go to the US actually, but it was too expensive. So I never even dreamt of applying. But then at that point, I thought I just need to get away. And like a lot of people, it looks like the US is always the salvation. And I just loved it so much, even more than the first time around. I did really well and I went again on that path of great success, but that sort of wound, you keep it forever. And it's made me very suspicious of a lot of things that I wouldn't have been suspicious of before.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Suspicious of hierarchies and systems, et cetera?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yes. And the kind of certainties you have when you succeed under certain terms and, and also of the fake persona I had built to fit under the existing system. To fit in, you had to not show any vulnerability. And when you hide behind facades like that, you're not learning. You're just wasting a lot of cognitive energy. I needed the freedom of the American system to rebuild and find out exactly who I was.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  It's your belief, I gather, that shy people and the people who would never think about running for office are on average as, let's say, useful or capable of governing as those who stand for election? Is that the case?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Yes, that is absolutely right. That's in fact, the meaning of political equality is that we're not going to discriminate based on your confidence level or your knowledge or your pedigree when it comes to issues of the common good. We need to agree on things that are not pleasant and all of us should have a say. That's a premise of democracy. The fundamental principle of citizens assemblies is that they are randomly selected. You're already trying to pull in people who would never show up to a town hall meeting, right? Who would not volunteer for something that typically attracts the more vocal, the more interested, et cetera. So it's a very different setup from the beginning. And then you have all these facilitation techniques to bring out the shy, like to make sure the vocal do not interrupt, do not intimidate, et cetera.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  If you compare the quality of deliberation, you could say that yes, they do better than politicians.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Do we think of, let's say, US Congress as deliberative body in the same way that we used to? In other words, is Congress any good at deliberating anymore? And is that what we're comparing these mini publics to?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  I would say in political theory, yes, they were created as deliberative bodies. That's what the Federalists envisioned. I do think they still live on that promise of being able to figure out the truth about the problems we face and the solutions we need. And it's supposed to happen in the conflict of arguments between parties and camps. But it's definitely no longer the case. I don't think you sense that they're listening to each other in a sincere way, trying to solve issues together. It's a lot more about scoring points. If the Federalists wanted a deliberative assembly, my view is that they should have aimed for a randomly selected assembly rather than an elected one.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Coming up after the break, what did the Federalists want? I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We will be right back.

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• 26:07Speaker 00

  History is full of good ideas that die out or never catch on in the first place. But some of them get a second chance, could be years later. In the scientific literature, these are called sleeping beauties, dormant ideas just waiting to be revived. Terry Baricius and Elen Landemore believe that sortition, the ancient Athenian practice of choosing policymakers by lottery rather than vote, deserves such a revival. They say that the electoral system in the US is beyond repair. Baricius thinks the problem goes all the way back to the founders. He likes to cite something that James Madison wrote in 1787.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Representative appointments are sought from three motives, ambition, personal interest and the public good. Unhappily, the two firsts are proved by experience to be most prevalent. Madison realized that elections were basically people looking for ambition and personal interest. And he thought public good was in the mix, but it was the third.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Now, we should say that the founders, including Madison, talked about a natural aristocracy, a governing elite.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  That was the concept. The well to do property owners were the people most likely to be virtuous and wise.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  If you were sitting back then, what do you think you would have thought of that notion?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I would have rejected it. Elections did exactly what they wanted them to do to make sure that the rabble, the mob, was not anywhere near the levers of government. And they even had these arguments that we don't allow children to vote, we don't allow women to vote, and we don't allow people who don't own property vote because they can be controlled by their quote unquote master. You know, the husband can tell the wife how to vote or the employer can tell the laborer how to vote. So we can't let them vote. Only people who have enough wealth to have independent judgment should be involved.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  But if you go back a couple thousand years to the Athenians, they had a very different view, right?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  As Aristotle said, lotteries are democratic and elections are oligarchic. That was the view of political theorists for over 2,000 years, up through Rousseau and Montesquieu. The American founding fathers understood that too, but they didn't want a democracy. So elections were the appropriate tool.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  What you're saying right now is even then, the powerful understood how power was

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Accrued and held on to and that an election, while seemingly a sorting mechanism to produce a meritocratic result, was indeed meant to be a control mechanism from the outset. Is that what you're saying?

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, the fact that we use the word democracy to describe what is an oligarchic system of election is almost Orwellian reversal of what that word meant for over 2,000 years. Sortition is sort of how they did democracy in ancient Athens. All we ever learn about Athens is the huge assembly. That's what we all learn about in school and say, oh, you can't do that in a big country. Therefore, there's nothing to learn from them. But the fact is, all of their governing bodies, the ones that set the agenda, the ones that ran the city day to day, the ones that actually, after 403 B.C., when they had the reforms, the ones that were adopting all new laws, all those bodies were selected by lottery. The general assembly, the huge open body,

• 29:31Speaker 01

  they could declare war, they could pass resolutions, they could give tributes, but they couldn't adopt laws. They themselves transferred power to adopt laws to a jury process.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Elen Landemore of Yale also thinks the Greeks had it right.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  They knew that you shouldn't give power to people who want power. It's a theme of literature, like from Lord of the Rings. The ring will corrupt you, so you don't want to give it to people who are imminently corruptible. At the same time, I do think leadership matters. The question is, how do you elevate leaders in a way that doesn't go to their heads, doesn't entrench their power, doesn't make people feel inferior or subordinated?

• 30:15Speaker 00

  You like the idea of sortition, going back to ancient Athens, yes?

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  If this is such a good idea, and if it was or could be such a good system more broadly, why did it vanish essentially?

• 30:30Speaker 02

  That's a big puzzle. In the 18th century, 19th century, the practice of drawing lots to select public officials completely disappeared. Bernard Manin, who's an important political theorist in France, blames it on a confluence of things. One is the fact that social contract theory was the dominant theory of legitimacy from the 17th century onward. We equated democracy with getting people's consent at the ballot box. When you have sortition, it seems to violate that requirement of consent. Another reason that I find compelling is that the 18th century, when we reinvented democracy, was the age of the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment is really the elevation

• 31:14Speaker 02

  of individual judgment and reasoning over the passions. You could say the French Revolution and the American Revolution happened just a bit too early for a lot to have its chance. We didn't have the statistical science that only emerged in the 19th century. It's the same thing for politicians today. They don't really get that you can have collective intelligence emerging from ordinary people. They don't understand the social science behind it. And they also have big prejudices against ordinary citizens because oftentimes, the ones they interact with are not representative in a demographic sense. They interact with the very vocal, angry people who show up at town hall meetings, who are not necessarily

• 31:59Speaker 02

  the brightest bulbs, actually, and who are very aggressive. For politicians, given their exposure to that version of the people, it's a little bit normal that they are skeptical.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  So Elen Landemore thinks that politicians may be exposed to the wrong kind of people. Terry Baricius thinks that politicians themselves are the wrong kind of people.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Elections have a certain internal logic and incentives that encourage people who are narcissists and psychopaths to seek power. I don't want to besmirch all politicians. Some of them are brilliant and excellent and humane and humble people. But as a group, they are more narcissistic and sociopathic than the population.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  This reminds me of something you recently published. This was a piece talking about the unrepresentative nature of legislatures. When you were in the Vermont Legislature, there was a housing bill that was affecting tenants and landlords. And you write that you noticed that the committee members relied more on anecdotal information from their social networks than statistical reports or witness testimony, especially the testimony on behalf of renters. You say that you surveyed the committee to find out how many of you were renters as opposed to homeowners? And the answer was zero.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  None. I then said, well, what about the whole house? I could only find one renter out of the 150 members of the House of Representatives. One. Meanwhile, nearly a third of Vermonters are renters. This is not a representative body. Within bodies that are trying to solve problems, there's some research to suggest that having a diversity, in many cases, is more valuable than having expertise. In fact, there's a theorem that you may have come across the-

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Hong Page, I think it's called.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not a universal thing. But when you have a relatively homogeneous group, they tend to know similar sorts of things. And there can be whole domains of knowledge that they're completely unaware of. Just having a diverse group, one person might bring one key piece of information. They go, oh, I didn't know that. I even use that example when people say, well, if you have a jury, you'd have to have a qualification. Like, you wouldn't have people who aren't able to read in it. And my argument is, once the jury gets to be a certain large size, hundreds of people, having that full diversity is valuable. For example, you're dealing with transportation. One of your members is a Down syndrome person who can't read. And I'll be like, oh, but what about Jeff? Jeff couldn't do that.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  We'd have to have a system where he could just hit a lever. That diversity, it's not just the knowledge they bring. It's the diversity itself is valuable.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  It does make me think that when we read about Congress deliberating on healthcare, transportation, you name it, that we're looking at the problem that you just described writ even larger, yes? Because the leverage is so much greater at the federal level.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  The fact is that in Congress, it's not just a bunch of mostly old white men, but a majority of Congress are millionaires. They might be like, oh, I had a working class job when I was first out of college or whatever. The point is, they're almost all lawyers, business owners, well-to-do people. To run for Congress, you have to be in a position in your life where you have a huge amount of free time or you can make a huge amount of free time without your family suffering. The dynamic is the selection process, not just the elections, but who has the time to run for it? Who has the connections to raise the money? All those things mean that the pool of people that voters have to choose among is a very distorted, slanted group of people.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  If elections are as terrible as you make them out to be, how do you explain that elected liberal democracies have consistently outperformed pretty much every other type of government around the world?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  We've never had a sortition democracy to compare them to. See, that's the problem. People think the choices are elections or dictatorship. And between those two, I'm on the side of elections. If people think those are the only two choices, and that's what 99.9% of Americans assume, then yeah, elections. Like, the jury, why do we trust randomly selected people to make life and death decisions? There's a reason. They're resistant to corruption. They deliberate as political equals. They reflect the values of their community, government of the people, by the people, for the people. We don't have that in the United States.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Let's go back for a second to the British Columbia Citizens Assembly. What happened that the sitting politicians wanted or at least allowed that assembly to form?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  What happened is, there was the NDP and the Liberal Party and the right wing party. And they had this weird election where one party got like 47%, the other got like 43%, and another party got a small percentage. And one party had every single seat in the legislature except two. This is crazy. And then the next election, the parties, just a small change in vote, completely switch role, and another party was in control. And they had made a pledge that if we get back in power, we're going to set up a body to reform this insane, it's the same voting system that we use in the United States, winner take all, single seat elections. And so they thankfully followed through on their commitment. And they said, you know what? All of us politicians have a conflict of interest. We'll set up a body that has no politicians.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  So they talked to some professor and said, well, there's this sortition thing. And he proposed it and they passed it. And they said, you're going to design a new voting system if you think it's warranted, and it's going to go directly to referendum. And no politicians are going to put their fingers on it. And that happened. And they came up with a proposal, which was ranked choice voting, the system that I had given testimony advocating. And it got like 57% of the vote in the referendum. But the legislature had put a rule that they have to get more than 60% for it to go into effect. So it didn't happen.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  I see. So does that mean that the British Columbia Citizens Assembly is defunct now?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a one-time thing. They met for many, many months, 2004 into 2005, wrote a report. There was a referendum. It got 57% of the vote, but nothing changed.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  And these were randomly selected residents, as if being selected for jury duty, correct?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, very much like jury duty.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  The British Columbia story suggests to me that if you're trying to reform an electoral system and you're reliant on the entrenched beneficiaries of that system, the incumbents, that you're almost certainly going to fail. So how do you see getting around that?

• 38:38Speaker 01

  My strategy is, I call it peeling strategy. The idea is to peel away one policy domain at a time. You start with things that politicians are willing to be rid of because they're no-win issues for the politicians. And you set up a policy jury and you delegate the authority to create a new system. It might be on healthcare or climate change or housing or whatever, some issue. So there's a way you can do it piecemeal, step by step, without doing a huge shift. Because you're right, the current power structure is not going to say, oh, yeah, let's give away all our power to some other structure.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  You have to want the impossible to change the world.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  That's Helen Landemore again. After the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly, she says, there was another one in Iceland.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Really tried something quite daring.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  The Iceland idea came about, I think, if I remember correctly, because they had suffered so much from the 2008 financial crash, yes?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Yes, their economy collapsed, they burned seven times their GDP in the few months of the crisis, and the collusion between bankers and politicians was so obvious that they just didn't really have a choice, they had to do something drastic, so they sent 35 bankers to jail. It's probably the only country who did that in those proportions. Then they said, OK, we're gonna take this opportunity to start from scratch on a bunch of things, including our constitution, which we inherited from the Danish monarchy. It's a cut and paste. And they said, but we cannot have the current political personnel in charge of doing that because we just don't trust them. They organized an election that banned politicians from running for it to select a council of

• 40:18Speaker 02

  25 who would be in charge of rewriting the constitution on the basis of the recommendations of a 950 randomly selected panel of the whole population.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  The overall proposal, was it ever enacted or no?

• 40:33Speaker 02

  No, but again, when you try to implement the impossible, you're gonna run into a lot of failures, especially early on.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  OK, so if you're keeping score, we are 0 for 2 in sortition producing a policy change that actually stuck. But then, just over 10 years ago, there was major progress in Ireland. Here's Terry Baricius.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  This is rather astonishing. There are some deeply polarizing issues. What are we gonna do about this issue of same-sex marriage? It's a solidly Catholic country. Politicians didn't want to touch it, so they kicked the ball over to this sortition process. In this particular case, they set up a citizens' convention, which was lottery-selated, and a third of them were actually politicians and 2/3 randomly selected. They proposed legalizing same-sex marriage.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  They proposed legalizing, or they proposed a referendum that was voted on?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Well, they proposed that the constitution incorporate that as a legal possibility. That went, and the legislature, OK, we'll send it to referendum, and it passed with over 60% majority in the population.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  OK, that was in 2015, and then a similar thing happened with legalized abortion in Ireland?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  A couple of years later, politicians, oh, we're not gonna touch that, we'll let the sortition body look at it. It was all randomly selected, no politicians. Constitutional amendment had been put in banning abortion in Ireland. The question is, should we take that back out of the constitution? And they would pass, again, by a huge majority, saying, yes, let's take that out.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Ireland has by now used citizens' assemblies to deal with a variety of issues: drug policy, climate change, whether to remove a constitutional ban on blasphemy. France also put together a citizens' convention on climate, 150 people chosen by lottery. Here's Landemore.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  It was convened to be a sort of quasi-legislature because President Macron had said, I'll take your recommendations directly to a regulation, a referendum, or a parliamentary vote. But in practice, it wasn't completely true because, of course, we have a constitution and citizens' assemblies don't have a legal status in the constitution.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  You were in the citizens' convention on climate in France, you were what's called an official observer, yes?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Yes, I was a researcher.

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Did that citizens' convention on climate produce anything meaningful?

• 42:58Speaker 02

  I think so. One is it changed the conversation in the country about climate change. It became a common knowledge that this was a big issue and that we needed to do something about it in a way that wasn't there before. It also helped the cause of citizens' assemblies in general because before, most people hadn't heard of a citizens' assembly. Nine months after its creation, something like 70% of the population knew what a citizens' assembly was, and about 2/3 had a very positive opinion. And now you might ask, OK, what about the content of the recommendations? Opinions vary widely. I'd say the public perception is that this convention didn't have much of an impact because a lot of the recommendations were diluted at the ministry level.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  But the government itself says that over 70% of the recommendations were implemented. Critics on the left say that only 10% were implemented. I didn't try to measure it myself. My sense is that when you read the 2021 Climate and Resilience Bill, you can absolutely see the causal effect of the recommendation that came out of the assembly.

• 44:08Speaker 00

  The citizens' convention on climate made 149 proposals, from taxing corporate dividends to banning advertising for highly polluting products. Macron initially advanced all but three of their proposals: the dividend tax, a lower highway speed limit, and a constitutional amendment that Macron said could have prioritized environmental protection over other rights. And as Helen Landemore said, much of the rest got diluted at the ministry level. But the model of a citizens' assembly has held in France. A second convention on end-of-life care set the stage for an assisted dying law that France passed a few months ago.

• 44:49Speaker 00

  By that time, Landemore was already helping bring the sortition mojo from her country of birth to her adopted home, specifically to Connecticut, where she lives and teaches.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  The Connecticut Citizens' Assembly got started because of Daniel Chisbro, who is a former local politician in Connecticut. I was put in charge of the design. Connecticut has the bizarre property of having its local public services, so schools and firemen and police and park management and all of that, funded only through the property tax, which has led to a lot of problems. So they thought, why don't we tackle that? It started the conversation between homeowners and renters, between people who live in poor towns and people who live in rich towns, people who have no children and may think that, why am I paying for the children of other people?

• 45:43Speaker 00

  This summer, around 100 randomly selected Connecticut residents convened to discuss reforms to the state's property tax system. They met over six weekends, some in person at the Omni New Haven Hotel and some online. Participation was voluntary. I asked Landemore where those 100 volunteers came from.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  We send out 240,000 pieces of mail. It says, we're organizing a citizens' assembly on property taxes. You're invited to join this assembly, pay the certain amount for so many days.

• 46:16Speaker 00

  What are they paid?

• 46:17Speaker 02

  It's $1,200 for the whole thing.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Where do you get that money from?

• 46:21Speaker 02

  We raised it ourselves from individual donors.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  The Connecticut Citizens' Assembly on Property Taxes just released their final report a week before the midterm elections. At a press conference announcing their recommendations, several members of the assembly spoke about their experience. Here's Doris Gomez, a Verizon manager from Bridgeport.

• 46:44Speaker 05

  What makes today's report fundamentally different from others in the past is who built it. This report was not drafted by politicians, lobbyists, or special interest groups. This assembly was entirely citizen-led.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  And here's Carly Tuthill, who lives in Northfield, Connecticut, and works for a nonprofit.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  The process itself, for me, was so empowering. We started in small groups, came up with a couple of things, put them on sticky notes. If you could see the sticky notes that we had all through this massive ballroom, and then we would go and we would vote.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  The assembly required a 2/3 majority to approve each of the final 10 recommendations. Many are common sense recommendations, pushing the state to share services between towns, setting more predictable timelines around rulemaking. One of their more controversial recommendations was a tax increase on all income over $1 million a year.

• 47:46Speaker 06

  I am not a millionaire, so it's interesting to see kind of how people feel about this. There was definitely a lot of conversation around, OK, wealth or income, wealth or income? And there were some good points brought up that I know I didn't personally consider. We do recommend that income tax is advised here rather than a wealth tax in order to avoid disproportionately impacting other residents, such as farmers who might have high-valued farmland, small business owners, and those saving for retirement.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  All of these recommendations are just that, non-binding recommendations. Now they get passed on to state legislators for consideration. And the Connecticut Citizens' Assembly on Property Taxes has been disbanded. Assembly member Elliot Wyler, a media executive from Westport, is cautiously optimistic about what happens next.

• 48:37Speaker 07

  These are sort of recommendations that we are hoping the legislature will take up. I'm not sure that any of us realistically think that all of these will necessarily pass muster. I think a victory might be if several of them do. It's kind of hard to ignore 100 of your fellow citizens drawn from a cross-section of the state.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  It's too early to tell what policy changes might come out of the Connecticut Citizens' Assembly. Helen Landemore is already looking forward to more citizens' assemblies.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  Ideally, this would be mandatory. You would have options to get out of it, but at least the default would be you're expected to do it, it's an honor and it's a duty, like jury duty.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  When is the last time you served on a jury and what was your experience?

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness, I have a horrible confession to make because I was convoked for jury duty literally on the day I was supposed to attend a fundraising Zoom call that was painted to me as very important to raise money for our assembly. So I didn't go. I felt really bad, but I didn't go.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  So wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You're promoting a system that drafts everyday citizens into the deliberative governing system in a jury duty-style way, and yet you...

• 49:54Speaker 02

  I know, but you know, people are fallible. And also, I have to say, I think the jury duty system as it's currently organized is very deficient. Like, my husband also was corralled into one, and he said he was made to wait four hours with no explanation. I think what we're trying to do is different. We're supposed to take people's time very seriously. We would treat them better than the conjure system does. It's really not respectful of people's time.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  Coming up after the break, is it OK to want the impossible? I'm Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio, we'll be right back.

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• 52:23Speaker 00

  Let me take you back to that essay question that you wanted to answer a long time ago, which was, can you want the impossible? Just imagine for a moment that your definition of the impossible is a series of citizens assemblies across the United States that essentially replaces Congress. Is that an impossible dream that you could get behind?

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Yes, I would say you'd still need a centralizing one. You would have a legislature made of randomly selected people in Washington instead of Congress. And then you would have, at the state level, the same sort of body to represent the local interests. And then you'd have to figure out how they connect and work together.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  And how do you decide what's put on the agenda?

• 53:05Speaker 02

  My view is that there shouldn't be an agenda fixed for these people, actually. The way we run citizens assemblies currently is that the existing power structures give them one topic, and that's it. But if we're going to do it the way the Greeks did it, which is with a central agenda-setting assembly, there's no agenda that they don't choose. There's a way in which they need to look past the walls of that one assembly. That's where, you know, it gets very speculative.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  That is the nature of an impossible idea. It requires speculation. Terry Baricius has also done some speculating as to what government by sortition might look like in the US.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Here's the key thing is, it does not work to simply replace elected legislators in a legislature with randomly selected people. You need an entirely new architecture of government because you need a large number of assemblies. Many of them would be single issue, like this assembly is reviewing all proposals having to do with housing. They're not dealing with the military. And there would be also probably some body that's only dealing with agenda. Like, these are the problems we have in this country that have to be dealt with in the next two years. We want anybody in the country to give us ideas, solutions to these list of problems that we have concluded after a lot of study and a lot of testimony. These are the agenda items for the next term.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  So the agenda councils, as you've described, are literally deciding what is on the agenda to be explored, correct?

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  Okay, then they may gather some information from the public and elsewhere?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Well, it'll take it at a state level. Maybe once a year, they would convene a large panel that would be the agenda body they might meet for making up a time here, three months. They listen to a whole raft of witnesses come and say, we really need to do something about land management. We really need to do something about transportation. They get all these and they say, all right, legislature or the governing body, whoever, can't deal with all these issues this year. What's the priorities? And then all that goes to what I call a review panel. I use housing as an example. It would go to the housing review panel. And the housing review panel would take all this input on the agenda item that was selected, and they would craft a final bill from all the input they had.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  That review body might continue for several years to develop a certain level of expertise. But the key thing is, if they serve for many years, they may become less and less like the population. Therefore, they have no final say about anything. All they're doing is preparing bills. They have staff, they're not adopting anything. Like with politicians and elected legislature, it's like, they have passed a law, they stick with it. All the researchers say, it's a total failure, it's just not working, it's not working. But politicians don't want to admit that something that they did isn't working. So they stick with it, they put more money into it.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  So the review panel takes the item from the agenda council, they draft the bill, and they submit it to what you call a policy jury. These policy juries would be how large?

• 56:06Speaker 01

  They'd be quite large, because they have to be statistically reliably representative.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  So 1,000 people, maybe?

• 56:12Speaker 01

  It depends whether you're talking about a federal or county or municipal, but it would be much larger than a review panel. So on a state level, maybe it's 500 people. The point is, they're only going to serve for maybe a week or even less.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  So the policy juries actually vote, and their vote is binding, correct?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Yes, that's my idea, is that they would become binding.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Then you've got something called rules and oversight councils. What do those do?

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Well, my idea is that you want this to be a self-perfecting system. So you'd have a rules body that's selected by lottery, that would have staff, that knows all about organizational structure, and they would adopt rules for all the other bodies. Like, how many times can one person speak before another person gets to speak? And how many minutes do they get? And what is their salary? So they would constantly be fixing and improving the system. That's the rules body.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  So you need a quasi-mandatory function here, yeah? Like jury duty?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Whenever I talk about jury duty, the problem in the United States is that lawyers excuse people from jury duty, so it's not really random anymore. The jury pool is random, but our jury process in the United States is distorted by history to make it so that each lawyer is trying to create as biased a body as possible.

• 57:21Speaker 00

  Are you trying to undistort that process in this case? So anybody can serve?

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yes. And so everyone has an equal chance to serve. But you might do some stratified sampling, make sure it's representative. You can't do it 100%. Like, if a religious minority that says it's too worldly to serve in government, we all refuse, no one from our church will ever serve. You can't really work around that one. But by and large, it's more representative than any elected legislature in world history.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  If I work in DC, and if I work in, let's say, an agency as a civil servant, not as an elected official, I'm saying, well, you know, this is what we do. We do research, we understand policy, we look at academic research, we look at our past legislative moves and so on, and we try to determine what's been useful, what's been not, why things have failed, and so on. Are you replacing essentially the institutional civil service that now exists?

• 58:12Speaker 01

  No, quite the opposite. The idea is they would be reporting to and overseen by a review body that would give them direction of what kinds of things to do. People have this idea that politicians, elected representatives are experts in lawmaking, and they absolutely are not. They're experts at winning elections. All of the research, all of the drafting is done by staff. Politicians don't do any of that. Ted Kennedy in his biography said 95% of all lawmaking is done by staff. And the sortition body would be like that, too. But rather than being accountable to elected politicians, narcissists, and psychopaths, they'd be responsible to a jury kind of review body.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  I appreciate the logic of that. I also think it sounds like it could create a bureaucratic maze that makes Congress look like walking into a convenience store and buying a soda. In other words, just because you've rid your process of what you call the narcissists and the psychopaths, doesn't mean that you don't have potentially, I guess what it sounds like, chaos to me.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing. It is complicated trying to describe it, but it's like they all are supporting each other in a way. The rules have to be made by a body that is not then using the rules. So that veil of ignorance, if you don't know what the policy issue is going to be, you don't know who's going to be there, you have every incentive to make the best possible rules.

• 59:30Speaker 00

  So if I were to ask you to do a pre-mortem on sortition as a means of governance at state or federal level, whatever, if it were to fail, why would it fail?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Well, there's several things to worry about. There have been over 1,000 sortition bodies convened around the world, but the vast majority of them have been advisory. They write a proposal that goes to the city council or goes to the national legislature. Nobody has an incentive to worry about bribing them or corrupting them. Now, if they were making real decisions, suddenly you might have to have a whole new wall around them. If you have no candidates to throw money at in elections, lobbyists and billionaires lose that leverage, but they still have money. So maybe they'll just flood the airwaves with ads to make sure that everybody in the country understands why we need to build a lot of AI data centers.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  So maybe you'd have to say, you know what? We need to stop political advertising like that, too.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  How do you hold a citizens assembly accountable, let's say, for what looks to be in retrospect like a genuinely bad decision? If a sortition body voted to repeal the First Amendment, let's say, what happens then?

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing. There's two aspects of accountability. If the agent and the body of representatives has a different set of interests or is not like the people, you have to hold them to account, you've got to make sure that they do the right thing. And the only punishment we have is we're not going to let you continue doing that. We're going to vote you out of office. But with a sortition body, that completely goes away because they are representative. They're a random sample of the people who think, reason, and experience the world like the population. The only difference is they then study and learn and gather information. They will sometimes make bad decisions. If they make a bad decision, the next jury that comes in to deal with that issue, they

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  have no vested interest in maintaining it. They're not politicians who, oh, I have to defend my record. I have to stick to my guns on this issue. No, they're perfectly willing to say, no, those guys were jerks.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  In a sortition government, let's say it's at the federal level. Pick your time, 10, 20, 50 years from now, the Terry Baricius dream is real. How do these different bodies, the agenda councils, review panels, policy juries, rules and oversight councils, how did they interact with, let's say, current government institutions like Department of State, Defense, HHS, et cetera?

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Well, the executive branch has to be completely changed as well. The executive branch must be an administrative executive, not a policy executive. There's no logical reason to have an executive have anything to do with policy creation. They can propose things.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Would there still be a president?

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  My notion is no. I mean, there are mayors in the country that basically cut ribbons and they kiss babies, but they don't have a policy role. And you could have a president that's like that, I guess, but whether it's Roosevelt or Trump, they took on far more power than any previous president. And my fear is just the title itself and the history of the office. Historians talk about the imperial presidency and so on, because that's just a very dangerous path. It just ends in authoritarianism, no matter what.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  So Terry, how would you describe your own politics these days?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  I nowadays try not to describe them because I've talked about sortition to very right wing and libertarian organizations, and they're nodding their head. And I think that sortition is a nonpartisan issue. I think we all tend to think if we could just get a room full of ordinary people and explain to them what we know and the facts that we've uncovered, they'd agree with me. And whether you're a Trumper, or a socialist, or a Christian nationalist, there's this attitude that ordinary people would agree with me. And therefore, sortition has this potential to be nonpartisan for a long time. At some point, once sortition bodies are actually doing things, people say, oh, wait, the population doesn't agree with me.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't like this. So the full answer is my politics are extreme left, but sortition is not.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  So what are you proposing exactly? Is it an experiment or three? Is it an electoral revolution, clean reset?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  The first step is doing what they've done throughout the world. If you are a well-read person in France, or Denmark, or Germany, or the UK, you know all about sortition because there've been dozens or hundreds of citizens' assemblies. They've been in the newspaper. Everybody knows about them. In Australia, Japan, the United States, nobody knows about it. The first thing is just to have a bunch of these advisory citizens' assemblies that are all over the place so that people, oh, yeah, I've heard about that. They had one in Tulsa recently. They came up with a really good recommendation about such and such. So that's the first step. And that phase might go on for some years. Then we need some place, probably a municipality, or maybe even a state, saying, we're going to transfer all decisions about policy X to a jury process. The politicians are happy to be rid of it.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  They don't like dealing with it anyway. And then when they'll work well, say, oh, that worked well. Why don't we try doing it for this other thing?

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  So what do you think? What do you think of this democracy by lottery plan that Terry Baricius and Len Landemore have been laying out for us? I went back to DJ Hairston, the lawyer from the jury trial that got me thinking about this idea in the first place, and I asked him what he thought of the sortition idea.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  For some things, I think it would work, but for other things, you could just get a bad jury.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  I think juries are good for our community, for zoning laws and things like that. Education, I think budgets. But when you start talking about who gets to vote, part of it is you could get a bad jury. I think that's most of American history. These are just a bunch of people making choices that, at least right now, seem fairly self-interested.

• 1:05:47Speaker 03

  But I do have the hope that we will get to some sense of duty. We are the ones that have to get this country together. Like, it's us. It's us as the citizens and not like a specific group of anybody, but it's us.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  And how will sitting politicians feel about sortition? It would, after all, replace them. I spoke with New York Governor Kathy Hochul a few months ago, before she won reelection this week. I told her about Terry Baricius's book, Democracy Without Politicians.

• 1:06:19Speaker 04

  I'll say I'm intrigued by it. And I also think maybe that starts at the local level, like when people run for school boards. I'm open to all ideas. I'm intrigued with it. In fact, I might just read the book and see what my thoughts are. I'm not sure how it fared for the ancient Greeks. I don't know where it went off the rails there.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  And I thought about one other argument that Len Landemore made in favor of sortition. Her argument didn't have anything to do with politics, really, or sampling methods, or whether the recommendations of a citizens' assembly should be binding. It had to do with love. She was telling me about the first time she saw a citizens' assembly in action, in France.

• 1:06:59Speaker 02

  You had people who didn't know each other on day one, who came in very skeptical, who came in, you could tell, hurt, used to be ignored, convinced that this was just a scam and maybe they should go home, and also suspicious of other people because, you know, they're used to being slammed for their political opinions. In just two weekends, the mood completely flipped, and it became this place where people just treated each other like family, really, like hugged each other, exchanged gifts, listened patiently. It was just remarkable. And it gave me a vision for what politics could be that I just had never thought of. Like, I thought politics by nature was sort of like toxic and partisan, conflict-ridden,

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  and just in general, distasteful. Like, that's why I was never interested in it in the first place. I was so proud. I remember standing outside the CESO, which is the organizing entity, and it's seated in this beautiful brutalist building next to the EFL Tower, next to a French flag. And I was just having all these emotions, and I didn't know what they were, but they felt like what people called love of country, you know, and love of my people. That was really a surprise. It gave me hope that we can do things differently. You have to believe that it's going to make a difference and inspire people. I get a lot of emails and a lot of reactions that make me feel like it's sparking some hope in people, and I think hope is very powerful.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  Hope may be powerful and even necessary, but it's not sufficient. As frustration with our political system grows, it does seem like a lot of people are open to different ideas. Is sortition the right kind of different? It does seem like an idea worth taking seriously, because if Landemore is right, sortition could make all of us a bit more hopeful about our governments and ourselves. We, the people, remember us? My thanks to Len Landemore, Terry Baricius, DJ Hairston, Kathy Hochul, and thanks especially to you for listening.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  Our email is [email protected] if you have any thoughts to share. Coming up next time on the show, fertility in the US has been falling, as it has in many other countries. One solution may be staring us right in the face.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  It's free and it works. I mean, what else would you want?

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  Does work from home lead to more baby-making? It's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Teo Jacobs and Augusta Chapman. It was edited by Ellen Frankman and mixed by Jake Loomis, with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Claire Curran-Kegan, Dalvin Avwaji, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Emma Kaisner, Pete Madden, and Tessa Troyline. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  The thing is, history moves in jerks.

• 1:10:22Speaker 00

  Some people would say that history is moved by jerks also.

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• 1:10:38Speaker 00

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• 1:11:59Speaker 03

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