Corvee labor is when you pay taxes with your time and effort, instead of your dollars; historically it’s made sense mostly for smaller societies without cash economies. Once you have a cash economy, it doesn’t make very much sense; rather than having everyone spend a month a year building roads, better to have eleven people funding the twelfth person who builds roads, as they can get good at it, and will be the person who is best at building roads, instead of a potentially resentful amateur.
America still does this in two ways. The military draft, which was last used in 1973, is still in a state where it could be brought back (the selective service administration still tracks the men who would be drafted if it were reinstated), and a similar program tracks health care workers who could be drafted if needed.
The other is jury duty. Just like one can have professional or volunteer soldiers instead of having conscripted soldiers, one could have professional or volunteer jurors. (See this op-ed that makes the case, or this blog post.) As a result, they would be specialized and understand the law, instead of being potentially resentful amateurs. The primary benefit of a randomly selected jury—that they will (in expectation) represent the distribution of people in society—is lost by the jury selection process, where the lawyers can filter down to a highly non-representative sample. For example, in the OJ Simpson trial, a pool that was 28% black (and presumably 50% female) led to a jury that was 75% black and 83% female. Random selection from certified jurors seems possibly more likely to lead to unbiased juries (tho they will definitely be unrepresentative in some ways, in that they’re legal professionals instead of professionals in whatever randomly selected field).
I’m posting this here because it seems like the sort of thing that is a good idea that is not my comparative advantage to push forward, and nevertheless might be doable with focused effort, and quite plausibly is rather useful, and it seems like a sadder world if people don’t point out the fruit that might be good to pick even if they themselves won’t pick them.
Re: the draft, my understanding is that the draft exists in case of situations where nearly the entire available population is needed for the war effort, as in WWII or the Civil War. In such a situation, the idea of a professional armed force doesn’t make sense. But if I think about Vietnam, which was the last time the draft was used in the US, it seems like it would have been better to recruit the most willing / most capable soldiers
Corvee labor is when you pay taxes with your time and effort, instead of your dollars; historically it’s made sense mostly for smaller societies without cash economies. Once you have a cash economy, it doesn’t make very much sense; rather than having everyone spend a month a year building roads, better to have eleven people funding the twelfth person who builds roads, as they can get good at it, and will be the person who is best at building roads, instead of a potentially resentful amateur.
America still does this in two ways. The military draft, which was last used in 1973, is still in a state where it could be brought back (the selective service administration still tracks the men who would be drafted if it were reinstated), and a similar program tracks health care workers who could be drafted if needed.
The other is jury duty. Just like one can have professional or volunteer soldiers instead of having conscripted soldiers, one could have professional or volunteer jurors. (See this op-ed that makes the case, or this blog post.) As a result, they would be specialized and understand the law, instead of being potentially resentful amateurs. The primary benefit of a randomly selected jury—that they will (in expectation) represent the distribution of people in society—is lost by the jury selection process, where the lawyers can filter down to a highly non-representative sample. For example, in the OJ Simpson trial, a pool that was 28% black (and presumably 50% female) led to a jury that was 75% black and 83% female. Random selection from certified jurors seems possibly more likely to lead to unbiased juries (tho they will definitely be unrepresentative in some ways, in that they’re legal professionals instead of professionals in whatever randomly selected field).
I’m posting this here because it seems like the sort of thing that is a good idea that is not my comparative advantage to push forward, and nevertheless might be doable with focused effort, and quite plausibly is rather useful, and it seems like a sadder world if people don’t point out the fruit that might be good to pick even if they themselves won’t pick them.
Re: the draft, my understanding is that the draft exists in case of situations where nearly the entire available population is needed for the war effort, as in WWII or the Civil War. In such a situation, the idea of a professional armed force doesn’t make sense. But if I think about Vietnam, which was the last time the draft was used in the US, it seems like it would have been better to recruit the most willing / most capable soldiers