The week between Christmas and New Years is the lowest period of my blog readership. This is a perfect time for a semi-private admission.
I learned sometime in the early-1960s, when I was active in politics (campaign manager, survey researcher and legislative analyst) that the most effective activists, over long periods of time, were the people who never took credit for themselves and always shared the credit. I personally wouldn’t work with anyone who took full credit for their efforts, so I knew no one else would either.
For my entire activist life I have shared credit for my work with others (including co-authoring nearly all my books) and still do.
One consequence has been that....
One consequence has been that I have been highly effective for more than fifty years. A less appealing consequence is that I get little or no credit for the multitude of my contributions to the world around me. I have plenty of pride and the absence of credit is painful.
So for one brief cold mid-winter moment I want to take credit for an
idea that will revolutionize the world of the future and for which
there can be no doubt that I was the creator. The idea is the random
selection of legislatures and other representative bodies.
This comes to mind as I watch my idea slowly become part of society. In a recent Los Angeles Times report, two members of the California Assembly are asking for a randomly selected group of citizens to be selected and funded to review the California elective process.
I first wrote an article on this subject in Spring of 1975, published in the Fall CoEvolution Quarterly (I put up a
PDF file of the article). Unambiguously the first written document on
the subject. Such a random selection mechanism had been used in Athens for more than a
century called “sortition” but it had never been proposed in modern
times with a modern mathematical understanding of randomness.
Four years later (June 8 1979), I published a joint op-ed piece with Robert Gnaizda in the L.A. Times on the subject and the Pacific News Service sent out a press release on our proposed random legislature.
In 1985, I published a book, A Citizens Legislature, on the subject with co-author Ernest (Chick) Callenbach. I later put the book online after sales dropped off in the mid-1990s.
If you Google citizens legislature, random legislature, random assembly or any variation on these words you will get tens of thousands of citations.
There … I gave myself credit and it feels OK.