Marketing agencies and actuaries have become amazingly good at slicing and dicing the American people into groups where they can predict their behavior. They know how to persuade a man to buy antiperspirant, or show a child which toy they should tell their parents to buy for them. They can convince you which drugs would be good for your health, or which car you would look best driving. Could we apply this to politics in a positive way?
In the House of Representatives each represents about 650,000 people. What if we were to create a statistical sample of about 1000 people from their district for each representative. It would represent race, gender, religion, origin, economic status, etc. This representative would then be required to spend 30 minutes talking to each of the 1000 people each year.
We have this problem with all these lobbyists who clearly dominate the time or our representatives, but the real question is...
Do these lobbyist accurately represent the constituents?
I think most of us would agree the answer is absolutely not. Wouldn’t this be a great addition to our Democracy if our reps were required to spend a majority of their time talking to a sample of people that is most like the people they represent?