The Penguin and the Leviathan by Yochai Benkler

Author:Yochai Benkler [Benkler, Yochai]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-59019-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

Lotteries, the Draft, and Why We Wait in Lines

Of course, while intentions and outcomes are easy enough to tease out in experimental settings, in real life they are generally more difficult to unlink; after all, a situation in which someone is deliberately trying to maximize his own gains at another’s expense is unlikely to result in an outcome that anyone would consider fair. This is why, for those interested in designing a fair system of any kind, it is helpful to look at the third dimension of fairness that we care very much about—the fairness of processes. The fact that participants are willing to accept less equal splits when the proposer has “won” or “earned” the endowment suggests that if we deem the process that produced an unequal outcome—such as a lottery, or an executive bonus award process—to be fair, we’ll accept the outcome as a fair one even if the outcome is unequal.

There is evidence to suggest that we care even more about the process than the actual outcome of a situation. How many times have you heard someone accept a less than favorable outcome with the words “what’s fair is fair.” One type of process that we widely perceive to be fair, regardless of outcome, is one that is random, again, like winning the lottery. Take how the public perception of the Selective Service draft process shifted during the Vietnam War. At the start of the war, there were all kinds of deferments—for education, fatherhood, certain professions—that clearly favored some (wealthier) groups over others. By 1969, however, as resistance to the war grew louder and stronger, most of these deferments were abandoned and a random lottery system was implemented. This didn’t make the war any more popular, but it was clear that as the pressure mounted, the government had to do something to blunt the rage about the terrible unfairness of the fact that some young soldiers were sent to fight and die, while others weren’t. To do so, it resorted to a process of blind luck rather than a more rational process based on reason (one could argue that it’s more reasonable that someone who is, say, training to be a doctor or a physicist be allowed to stay behind because he or she is ultimately performing a greater service in their profession than they would as a soldier).

This perception of the lottery process as being inherently fair dates as far back to biblical times. In the Old Testament, when the Israelites need someone to blame for angering God and costing them failure in conquering a town, they draw lots to decide. Similarly, in the book of Jonah, Jonah is chosen as the scapegoat for a storm because he drew the unlucky lot.

One would think this kind of scapegoating would be perceived as wildly unfair in modern culture. But in reality it’s not so different from modern-day practices like the draft, or the lottery for Super Bowl tickets among season ticket holders. In these cases we all

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