00:06:57 · Jeff Guo, Sean Scanlon, Erika Beras, Helene Landimore
[00:06:57] S3: Yeah. Sean says every plan always runs into the same problem. Because to fix this issue, politicians might have to make hard choices, raise taxes or cut spending. But which taxes? What spending? Their choices would almost certainly make some voters mad. [00:07:15] S8: You know, politics, and I can say this because I am a politician, is usually the path of least resistance. Right? People want to be popular. They want to be well liked. It's rare that a politician goes out every day and says, you know, I'm gonna try to piss everybody off that I can. [00:07:31] S2: And this is a common problem with the way our democracy works. Most politicians are fixated on getting reelected. Nobody wants to be the bad guy. [00:07:40] S3: Which is why Sean was intrigued last year when he was approached by a group representing the towns and mayors of Connecticut. They had this idea of creating essentially a random jury of a 100 citizens. Get them to fix this problem. [00:07:56] S2: This group was working with a few academics, including a political science professor at Yale who had been studying these types of experiments in democracy. Her name, Helene Landimore. Sean looked her up. [00:08:08] S8: The first thing I googled about her was that she had written a book called Politics Without Politicians. So, [00:08:15] S3: Politics Without Politicians. That's the name of Helene's book where she lays out the case for why politicians are maybe not great for democracy. Have you ever thought about being a politician? [00:08:28] S4: No way. No. Oh, my goodness.
00:08:28 · Helene Landimore, Erika Beras, Jeff Guo
[00:08:28] S4: No way. No. Oh, my goodness. [00:08:31] S2: This is Ellen Landimore, and actually, she did win an election when she was in the seventh grade back in France. She was the class representative. [00:08:41] S4: And it went to my head, and I became this, like, horrible person, and I lost friends, and people were jealous, and I just hated the whole thing. I absolutely hated the whole thing. I think power is exactly what the Greeks thought of it. It's it's a dangerous thing that if you hold it for too long, it destroys your soul. [00:08:58] S3: Since her days as the tyrant of seventh grade, Helene went on to become a political scientist, and she's studied how democracy originally worked in ancient Greece, which is often thought of as the birthplace of democracy. [00:09:11] S2: And she says one thing the Greeks did became a big inspiration for her research and the experiment now happening in Connecticut. See, in ancient Greece, they picked most of their lawmakers, not through elections, but through random lotteries. And all these randomly selected public officials would take turns. So nobody held on to power for too long, and everybody, at least all the male citizens, got to participate. [00:09:38] S3: And over the past decade, Alen has been wondering, why can't we have more random citizens in politics today? Right now, the people who become politicians, they tend to fit a certain type. You know, around the world, they tend to be men. They tend to have college degrees. A lot of times, degrees from the same fancy colleges.
00:09:38 · Jeff Guo, Erika Beras, Helene Landimore
[00:09:38] S3: And over the past decade, Alen has been wondering, why can't we have more random citizens in politics today? Right now, the people who become politicians, they tend to fit a certain type. You know, around the world, they tend to be men. They tend to have college degrees. A lot of times, degrees from the same fancy colleges. [00:09:58] S2: They even tend to share some of these same personality traits. [00:10:02] S4: There's an overrepresentation of people who have certain psychological traits like extreme confidence, attraction to power, corruptibility. [00:10:12] S2: The kind of people who wanna be in front of people are the kind of people that will seek out politics. [00:10:17] S4: Yes. Exactly. [00:10:18] S2: Helene is like, how can you help the people if you aren't of the people? Which is why she's been studying citizen assemblies where randomly selected citizens try to help create new laws. [00:10:30] S3: For instance, in The Netherlands, a group of about a 140 citizens was asked to try to reform how the country does elections. In Ireland, a citizen assembly recommended making major changes to the constitution, including legalizing same sex marriage. And in France, the citizens came up with proposals about how to curb climate change. Alain sat in on that one as an observer. [00:10:50] S2: And last year, Alain was asked to help bring this experimental form of democracy to Connecticut. The Connecticut Citizens Assembly will be one of the biggest of its kind ever attempted in The United States.
00:10:50 · Erika Beras, Jeff Guo, Helene Landimore
[00:10:50] S2: And last year, Alain was asked to help bring this experimental form of democracy to Connecticut. The Connecticut Citizens Assembly will be one of the biggest of its kind ever attempted in The United States. [00:11:03] S3: I can't help but imagine some people looking at this and saying, well, property taxes are very complicated. Do we really want a 100 randos Yes. To to make these, like, very complicated policy decisions that, you know, people go to school for this? [00:11:18] S4: I I know. I know because our our intuitions are individualistic. It's very hard to understand the the concept of collective intelligence and and... Until you've actually seen it in action. [00:11:27] S3: Earlier this year, the state of Connecticut got to see a citizens' assembly in action. Ellen and the organizers sent out over 200,000 invitation letters to random Connecticut residents. About 1,500 people responded that they did want to participate in a citizens' assembly. [00:11:45] S2: From there, the organizers had to pick a 100 of these volunteers to serve on the assembly. To make sure the assembly had the right balance of people, the organizers got a computer to randomly generate potential configurations of the assembly. [00:11:59] S3: They wanted a good mix of homeowners and renters, people with school age children, people without, and people representing different parts of the state.
00:11:59 · Jeff Guo, Erika Beras, Sean Scanlon, Stacy MacGyver
[00:11:59] S3: They wanted a good mix of homeowners and renters, people with school age children, people without, and people representing different parts of the state. [00:12:08] S2: The computer generated thousands of potential configurations. To make the final selection, the organizers held the lottery in June of this year, a literal lottery that they recorded. The organizers gathered at the headquarters of the Connecticut lottery. [00:12:24] S9: Please proceed. [00:12:25] S3: They fired up the same machine that they use for the Powerball drawings, used these same little yellow balls, and that is how they picked the 100 people who would serve in this assembly. [00:12:37] S10: Number is 29. 29. [00:12:43] S2: The challenge before the 100 lottery winners over the next few months, they'll meet over four weekends and have a couple all day Zoom sessions and hopefully come up with a solution to Connecticut's tax problem. And for all their troubles, they'll each get $1,200. [00:12:59] S3: Exactly one month later, in July of this year, the chosen citizens met for the first time in a lecture hall in New Haven. [00:13:07] S10: I'm a single mom of two, and our property taxes are very expensive. [00:13:12] S9: I was renting. I got laid off and then got another job, so I moved back in with my parents about three months ago. [00:13:20] S2: Those are citizens Stacy MacGyver and Riley Jano. Stacy is an occupational therapist who loves to talk to people. Riley is a lifelong Connecticut resident. Jasmine Dawson, on the other hand, she recently moved to the state.
00:13:20 · Erika Beras, Jasmine Dawson, Bob Bailey, Jeff Guo, S0, Riley Jano, Stacy MacGyver
[00:13:20] S2: Those are citizens Stacy MacGyver and Riley Jano. Stacy is an occupational therapist who loves to talk to people. Riley is a lifelong Connecticut resident. Jasmine Dawson, on the other hand, she recently moved to the state. [00:13:33] S5: I originally come from New York, Brooklyn. I've been here since 2021. [00:13:37] S2: Bob Bailey works in insurance. He calls himself a humble middle manager. [00:13:41] S6: Father of of six, married to one. [00:13:45] S3: Bob is excited to be here. [00:13:47] S6: I think we can make a difference [00:13:48] S0: for the people of Connecticut. [00:13:50] S3: Their first challenge before they even got started talking about property taxes was to figure out how this whole thing was even gonna work. The citizens had the power to come up with their own rules about things like who would speak when, how would they vote, what would quorum be, what would their values be. [00:14:08] S2: And the discussion just on these rules got heated. [00:14:12] S11: It was... A lot of thoughts kept getting interrupted, so it was hard to get a full idea. [00:14:16] S10: It was like nitpicky comments. [00:14:18] S11: It kind of devolved into us just yelling to the loudest voice. [00:14:22] S5: It was very traumatic for me. That made me realize, like, oh, this is not gonna be as easy as I thought.