Why do you support CDP? 

Hi, I’m Mark! I’m one of CDP’s newest members. Why do I support CDP? It’s a question that could be answered a few ways. I’m certainly interested in capital-J Justice (after all, if people’s money is being collected by the government, why shouldn’t they decide where it goes?). I’m no less interested in its practical benefits (that money could do a lot of good for a lot of people!). For the moment, though, I’ll settle on another reason: I’m fascinated by the idea of participatory budgeting, and CDP is good to think with.

I say this in part because I spend so much time with citizens of states who actually practice participatory, democratic budgeting. For them, it’s not an abstract concept, but rather something done over a period of years or decades—really, something they do from cradle to grave. What is decided on isn’t trivial, but is instead of the highest importance. Shall we pay for the army this year? How much free food will we provide to the poor? Do we really need that expensive stadium? There’s a problem, of course (and this is an M. Night Shyamalan-level twist): my participatory democrats are all dead (like 2,000+ years dead). I’m an ancient historian who studies Athenian democracy.

One answer to this is the “wisdom of crowds” approach (i.e. it’s hard for one person to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, but the average of 1,000 people’s answers tends to get quite close). But I prefer to come at it from the incentive angle: why would they know how to? They’ve never been given a chance. It’s my experience that people don’t bother to read up much on things unless there is a pretty concrete problem at hand. An example: I once took a class on paleography (a fancy term for “reading medieval latin books”). It was awful. We were assigned a textbook with illustrations, and dense descriptions of “Carolingian miniscule script” with its clubbed ascenders and its restrained use of ligature. I remembered exactly none of that after reading. When I made it to class, George Brown—a good scholar but a bad teacher—repeated what was in the textbook for another two hours. Again, nothing. I only learned something about those absurd letters when we were assigned a final project: “tell me everything you can about this single page of text”. Something tangible. I sat down and reread my textbooks, now with a purpose, and to the extent I know anything about this now (and that remains an object of deep uncertainty), it was because I had had to solve a real problem. Public budgeting is the same way.