SPEAKER_10: Pushkin.
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SPEAKER_10: 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 a pen? The dean put together a group of 20 kids. We met in a conference room, looking out on the campus lawn. On a scale of 1 to 10, don't put your name on it. I would like you to rank your happiness with the Lawrenceville School's current electoral process. 10 is you think it's perfect. One is you think it's maybe time to bring in Adam. Adam. Adam Cronkrite. He was the reason I was there. Okay. Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. My name is Malcolm Gladwell, as you know. I am a writer, and I have a podcast called A Vision is 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 Cronkrite, 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 let 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 afternoon, I said, okay. Now that I've given you an alternative, how happy are you with what you have? A scale of one to ten. One is totally miserable with the status quo, and ten is delighted everything's perfect. I want to see your number, rip it off and hand it to me. Don't put your name on it.
SPEAKER_06: Do I have them all? As the students handed in their little slips of paper, I glanced at a few. I was taken aback.
SPEAKER_10: Lawrenceville had the perfect democratic system, and upon reflection, upon exposure to a little of Adam Cronkrite'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.
SPEAKER_10: 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 Cronkrite online. I was just rummaging around Google one day, and what he was doing struck me as 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? I'm from just outside of Syracuse, New York.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah. So central New York.
SPEAKER_10: How did you end up in Bolivia? Cochabamba, to be more precise. A mid-sized city in the mountains of central Bolivia. It turned out to be a long story. It starts in Canada, across Lake Ontario, from his hometown. I remember where I was when I thought of the idea, like, you know...
SPEAKER_11: Where were you? I was outside Victoria Hall, walking on Queen's campus. And it was spring.
SPEAKER_10: It was 2009. 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. It was kind of going to save the world, and coming to terms with this idea that, like, you know, it'd be difficult to get to the heights of power without having to make some serious compromises, externally, internally.
SPEAKER_11: And so then I was kind of like, okay, well, what am I going to do? What are we going to do? He began to read history, political science, turned it over in his mind, looking for a big idea.
SPEAKER_10: I was going to, you know, right all the wrongs. But I wasn't that involved in anything.
SPEAKER_11: 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.
SPEAKER_10: Occupy Wall Street! Occupy Wall Street! There was a tent city of activists in Sukhadi 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 Sukhadi 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 from Bolivia, the water activist Marcella Olivella.
SPEAKER_11: I kind of shared with her that I was feeling a bit burnt out, disillusioned from what I was seeing. And she said, well, yeah, come down to Bolivia and check out social movements there. So he did. Syracuse to Kingston to Sukhadi Park to Bolivia. He made his way to Cochabamba, and there he met Marcella's brother Oscar, who runs a foundation.
SPEAKER_10: So I was working with him for a while, and then Oscar one day was in the car and he was asking me, what are you into?
SPEAKER_11: So I started telling him about Democratic lotteries, and he had never heard of the concept.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_12: 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 their student council.
SPEAKER_10: 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. We wanted something that was very visual, that could generate buzz, and so they had some clay pots, and we used fava beans as a crop that they grow there.
SPEAKER_11: 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 aguayo, a traditional cloth. So it's from there, and it was also kind of visually beautiful.
SPEAKER_10: If there were 200 students running for 8 student council positions, they would put 192 green fava beans in the pot and 8 purple ones. Then all the candidates would line up. The kid reaches in under the cloth, grabs a bean. Do they hold it up if it's purple?
SPEAKER_11: They hold it up. If it's purple or green, they're supposed to hold it up. So the school can see.
SPEAKER_10: No campaigning, no speeches or posters, no glad handing, no ballots, no recounts. The whole selection was over in 20 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?
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SPEAKER_10: Adam Cronkrite learned three important things from his work on school lotteries in Bolivia. I'm going to call them Cronkrite'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?
SPEAKER_11: It varies by the school. It varies by the school. And so, at the night high school, these kids often work even on Saturdays. They've got a full schedule. So, we would usually get between 20 and 30 students who are volunteering for 12 spots. So, it wasn't a huge turnout.
SPEAKER_11: And then, at the rural K-8 school, it was literally like every student that could participate, participated in every lottery. And then, at another school we worked at later on, it was an urban high school, but in the morning, there you had at least half of the school.
SPEAKER_10: After the student council members finish 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? It's about three quarters who say no, right away. Why do they say no?
SPEAKER_11: Well, they 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 and ask people to vote for me. You know, it's the things that you can kind of guess are impediments.
SPEAKER_10: 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.
SPEAKER_11: 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 say no. 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.
SPEAKER_10: That's the first law. In a democracy, elections are supposed to encourage participation, but they don't. They discourage it. Lotteries encourage participation.
SPEAKER_10: Okay, Cronkwright'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 Cochabamba. At the Knight School, for example, the student government tackled all kinds of issues. Human trafficking is a big problem there. And so they organized a workshop on human trafficking that had like theatrical production and breakout groups and stuff. They've gotten first aid kits for their schools. Their schools don't tend to have them. They've organized educational field trips.
SPEAKER_10: The student council put together soccer tournaments and poetry competitions. They opened a library.
SPEAKER_11: The school didn't have one, and so they solicited book donations from institutions and DVDs. 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 7 p.m., the transportation workers didn't believe that they were students since they charged them double. So that was the first thing that they worked on. That was like priority number one for all the students was we want student ID cards. And so they made their own and distributed those. To Adam, the crucial thing about that long list of accomplishments was the range of things the students were interested in. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_10: It's a more diverse group. They come from different social circles versus typically, at least in Bolivia, it'll be like a group of friends who runs for election.
SPEAKER_11: So they have similar perspective on the school and what the school might need 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 together through a 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'll have jocks and artists and just kind of the whole gamut. The whole gamut. Democracies are supposed to be the best system for ensuring that a whole gamut of interests are represented in government.
SPEAKER_10: Cronkite'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 helped set up a nonprofit called Democracy in Practice to work with student governments in Bolivia. I can 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 Raul and I will come out and we'll be walking together and we'll be saying, oh, you know, so and so.
SPEAKER_11: 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. This brings us to Cronkite's third law, maybe the most important of all. Nobody knows anything.
SPEAKER_11: 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 closed body language, uncomfortable, didn't participate much. And we said, all right, we got our 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 their term, they're even voted by their peers as 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. The charisma that certain students will have and the confidence that they'll have. So the prediction, the mechanism we're using for predicting who will be a good leader is just flawed.
SPEAKER_10: So you're saying? Yeah. Yeah. Even you, even you sometimes fall into this trap of thinking that because a kid presents herself really well and is well spoken and charismatic that she's going to be a good leader. Yeah. Yeah. It's really difficult to counter that bias. Right. And obviously not every student who's confident, charismatic, you know, has a big ego and can't work well with others and doesn't show up.
SPEAKER_11: You know, we've had we've had several students who fit that mold and were great teammates. But generally, it's a lot easier to to teach a shyer 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 than 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. 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.
SPEAKER_10: That's why we 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.
SPEAKER_11: The teachers who often aren't in the meetings are just constantly fooled by you know, when when they come out 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 one student who got picked in the lottery. And during the lottery, I had a teacher turn to me and under his breath say, students are dead. He's not going to work out. You know, I found out afterwards, he was the one student from his class of 35 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 he really loved to work on meaningful projects and and be a part of a team.
SPEAKER_10: Now, I know what you're thinking. It's Bolivia. What works for teenagers in Cochabamba 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.
SPEAKER_08: Hello, this is Mike Lauer at NIH.
SPEAKER_10: Delighted that you volunteered 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 Lauer 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, Lauer's in the top 10. 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 30 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, Lauer's office is what's paying for it. So, every year his office gets 80,000 grant applications from around the country. They only have money to fund about 20% 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. The reviewers who are assigned a grant will give a brief presentation about the grant itself and what they thought were the strengths and weaknesses.
SPEAKER_08: This is then followed by an open discussion. After the discussion is complete, there is then a scoring. So first round is you're throwing out the bottom, the bottom half.
SPEAKER_10: That's right. Second round is you're scoring the remainder. And how, what is the score, the score is on a scale of what to what? How is the score represented? This is like golf, so a lower score is better. A score of 10 would be perfect.
SPEAKER_08: That means that as far as the reviewers are concerned, they can't think of anything better. A score of 90 would represent the absolute worst.
SPEAKER_10: 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. Cronkite's third law says that voters aren't very good at that prediction. So Lauer wonders, what about the NIH's grant reviewers? Are we any good at it? Does the proposal that got a perfect 10 from the voters at grant approval time actually end up being the most influential or innovative research once it's finished? Lauer 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 for how long?
SPEAKER_08: Seventy-five years.
SPEAKER_10: Seventy-five years. So we had this situation where we have a process in place for many, many years, 75 years, which is from an empirical perspective unexamined. Well, that's right. So Lauer says, let's take a look.
SPEAKER_10: 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 the correlation between the score of your grant application and the number of citations your work gets once it's finished? I think you know where this is going.
SPEAKER_08: We did not find a strong correlation between the peer review score and the citation metrics of the subsequently funded grant. Now, it's worth pointing something out. Lauer doesn't go into this thinking that the NIH is going to be subject to Cronkite's third law. Nobody knows anything.
SPEAKER_10: After all, Lauer's not talking about adolescents judging other adolescents. He's talking about distinguished scientists judging the potential of other distinguished scientists. We had assumed that we would find a reasonably strong correlation between the peer review score and the grant productivity.
SPEAKER_08: Really? I had assumed that you went in skeptical.
SPEAKER_08: No. But then again, exactly as I said, if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it research.
SPEAKER_10: Cronkite's third law applies outside of Cochabamba. 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 Cronkite's third law. It's Cronkite'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 Wall Street Journal by two microbiologists, Ferik Fang and Arturo Cosset-Valle, entitled, Taking the Powerball Approach to Funding Medical Research. Powerball, for goodness sake, with the subtitle, Winning a Government Grant is Already a Crap Shoot, Making it Official by Running a Lottery, Would Be an Improvement.
SPEAKER_08: There's a famous line from Niels Bohr 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.
SPEAKER_10: 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 the Lawrenceville School, like a 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, the student council president. And I told them about your work, I described 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, but you use essentially a peer review process to decide who was eligible for the student council. Right? They have to vote. Yep. And I said, well, given the fact that Dr. Lauer's work suggests that we're bad at making those kinds of predictions at the very top, would you consider changing the way you elect your student council and student council president? Yeah, I can imagine the laughs. No.
SPEAKER_10: On the contrary, as you'll discover, the students at the Lawrenceville School did not laugh at this idea at all.
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SPEAKER_10: Let's talk about Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box from the gods that contained special gifts, but they forbade her from opening it. In the end, Pandora's curiosity got the best of her. She opened the box, thereby unleashing curses upon mankind. Cut to 3,000 years later, and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promised something special inside, but in the end, many would say it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box, and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you and take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. And right now you'll save $200 on $1,000 or more at saatva.com slash gladwell. That's saatva.com slash gladwell. Picture this. It's Monday morning. You're cruising through hundreds of unread emails. You didn't know you needed Mimecast. Your impulse to promptly click, download or respond could be the launch of a cyber attack. You see, an email address is a direct digital path to the mind, the machine and the data of every person in your organization. That means your M365 accounts are at risk of cyber attacks, but you can put your mind at ease with Mimecast. They developed an integrated frictionless solution that fortifies your existing email security and reduces risk, cost and complexity, allowing your organization to work protected. Best of all, you can get set up in under five minutes with a free 30 day trial of their advanced email security and see all the malicious threats that your current security solution is letting through the cracks. So before you click your next email, visit mimecast.com for your free 30 day trial. That's M-I-M-E-C-A-S-T dot com to learn how you can work protected with Mimecast.
SPEAKER_10: Thoughts? Comments? Is this 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.
SPEAKER_12: You don't want to have to go to the 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 year ahead. You don't want to have to learn with them.
SPEAKER_10: 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 school's deans stand by the door. A microphone is passed to whomever wants to speak. This is a student named Soleil.
SPEAKER_12: You want 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 school. One of the president's most important functions at Lawrenceville is the school meeting that happens in the auditorium every Thursday morning. 45 minutes. All the students show up. It's a central part of the school culture.
SPEAKER_06: Hi, I'm Quinn. I think that a good public speaker is someone who's 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.
SPEAKER_10: Tay, Lawrenceville's current student body president. He's standing at the back of the room. Later when we chat, I learn he's half Nigerian, half Kenyan. Grew up in London. I've noticed that we have not heard from the current president of the student council.
SPEAKER_10: Hold on, wait for the uh... Tay is the only one in the room wearing a suit. A little bit of his English formality. Tell me why you think you were elected. 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 present 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.
SPEAKER_05: Did you really rap in your speech? Yes, so my closing speech, the person I was running against, he was a phenomenal speaker. He partakes in theater. 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 to... All the great public speakers, by the way, do that.
SPEAKER_10: Exactly. They claim that others are better public speakers.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, for real? No, but genuinely, he is someone who speaks on stage a lot. He is a theater kid, so he's great 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 rap in my closing statement.
SPEAKER_10: I have to say, I really like Tay. 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 Cronkrite 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 Cronkrite, he talked about this one student at one of his schools in Cochabamba. What happened to him? Like, what happened? I really should have played this tape for the Lawrenceville students. He just 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.
SPEAKER_11: The moment that they started to do some of that work, he just would wake up in meetings basically and start bottom-lining things. He said, 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 follow through. And that sometimes is in short supply when you're working with teenagers. And he really liked to do those types of things and he'd follow 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.
SPEAKER_10: Adam Cronkrite also told me about another student named Richard, new in school, completely introverted, who then blossomed and turned out to be one of the most effective student council members. I remember walking with him after one of the first meetings and I told him, you know, this is your opportunity. Everyone else in the group is looking to you as a leader.
SPEAKER_11: And he stopped dead in his tracks. He looks at me all confused and he says, I'm not a leader. I'm not always out front and domi nando, like dominating the conversation. And I told him, like, that's not our conception of leadership. A leader is someone who develops leadership in other people and works well on the team.
SPEAKER_10: 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, we'll never get the riches 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'd 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 45 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 NIH grant under the old system, you get to walk around and say, my grant was selected over thousands of others. It feels earned. If you win an election, you get to say, the people chose me. And the people get to say, I chose her. My name's Frankie, and I think another aspect of the arbitrarily picked lottery, its effect, I think it's worth thinking about its effect on the students themselves and their response in terms of their lack of control or say over who is decided to be the leader.
SPEAKER_10: But here's what I think Adam Cronkite 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. Suppose we did this and we've chosen a big set of people and then chosen our president by lottery. What percent of American presidents would have been female? Fifty. So wait, you guys, twice I've heard this argument that buy-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 whole lot of people right now who feel disenfranchised would feel enfranchised. It was at that point that a sophomore named Sommer 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.
SPEAKER_04: Who has that potential to learn and to grow and is open to other viewpoints, whereas someone who's already stuck in their ways. Sommer laid out her idea, then stopped, looked around the room.
SPEAKER_10: Wait, Sommer, don't give up. 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 Sommer stopped like that while exploring her idea, that's exactly the point of Adam Cronkwright'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 Sommer. Keep going. So, describe to me how this works. I like this idea a lot. 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, a video.
SPEAKER_04: And then from there, I was either thinking that there could be a lottery system from there because at that point you know the people chosen are ones you're equally interested in representing the community. Wait, so Sommer, we're going to call this the Sommer proposal. So, what you're saying is suppose all the students look at these 50 projects and then you're saying that they would vote on the ones they like the best?
SPEAKER_10: Yes. And then from that pool, you would do potentially a lottery?
SPEAKER_04: Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_10: I love this idea. Now that they had thought about their electoral system and talked about the alternatives, how happy were they with the status quo? I wanted a vote. I want a show of hands. Scale of 1 to 10. 10 meant happy, 1 meant disillusioned. What should it be? Hold on, what should it be? Because I'm going to let you know and I'm going to hold you to this. And I got them to agree that 6 should be the threshold. Anything less than 6? Anything less than that, they should consider calling their own Constitutional Convention and rewriting the rules. Raise your hands way up, way up, way up, way up. That carries the day folks. Alright, I'll let you know. Thank you all very much.
SPEAKER_10: I went home and counted. Their average happiness score with the electoral status quo? 5.3. 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.
SPEAKER_04: I think there's a lot to be said for that.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, you like that idea, Michaela? Yeah, I think I do. I'm not prepared to give you a full answer on it.
SPEAKER_03: You guys are so cagey.
SPEAKER_06: They were mostly juniors and seniors, either on the cusp of the endless college application process or in the middle of it.
SPEAKER_10: And college selection is the student body president problem times 10, right? The student runs for a highly coveted position. The university makes its prediction. But if NIH reviewers 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. Uh, yeah, I like it. I like the idea a lot.
SPEAKER_10: 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 so, yes. I called for another vote on support for college admission lotteries. Wait, show of hands.
SPEAKER_10: Oh, most of you, well, have. The revolutionaries are not at the gates of Lawrenceville. They're inside the gates. Next stop for Adam Cronkrite, New Jersey. Revidious History is produced by Mia Lobel and Lee Mingistu, with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Ana Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton, original scoring by Louis Skerra, mastering by Flawn Williams, fact-checking by Beth Johnson. A special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Hedda Fain, Carleen Migliori, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course, El Jefe, Jacob Weisberg. Oh, and big thanks to the staff and students of the Lawrenceville School for a really fun afternoon. I'm Malcolm Gappel. It would have been so much cleverer if I had had them have a lottery to decide on whether to have a lottery. That would have been so meta and great, but I missed that opportunity. Malcolm Gappel here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze, while providing your employees with a streamlined, world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford. The Bucks got your back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits.
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