Apr 12, 2011 at 10:56 AM
Its amazing how similar student governments can be to real governments.
In order to reach their goal of 20% student voter turnout the Northeastern University Student Government Assocation provided a system of prizes to every 99th voter. There was a counter on SGA's main web-site showing how many students voted.
A peculiar thing happened. While many students were unaware of this system, many SGA members were refreshing the clock over and over and racking up the prizes, such as free haircuts for life, for themselves.
You can see the source here, but its amazing how government at all levels can be so unaccountable.
Posted in:
- Blog Policy
- Login or register to post comments











I think you are touching on something very deep here.
The universe can be described as a series of nested games where the rules of each child game are trumped by the rules of its parent.
All of our specific approaches to organizing government and society are games built within larger games of tradition, morality, and violence. Corruption occurs when the rules of nested games are misaligned.
The SGA guys realized that the voting incentives game aligned with rules higher in the pecking order than student government code or morality, basic jungle opportunism. I can take your property without your knowledge, and even if you do find out, you aren't likely to pay the cost of motivating me to give it back, like chimps in the zoo slying away with each others' oranges.
The really interesting line to your post is "its amazing how government at all levels can be so unaccountable." Accountability is the construction of yet another level of rules to govern behavior, a 'who watches the watchmen' kind of problem. And it's a problem that doesn't go away, no matter how much or little government you have.
What I feel is a poor assumption of libertarian thought is that merely eliminating layers of rules or watchmen achieves better shelter against the more basic, brutal game of the jungle.
The proper number of rules is probably related to the complexity of the game. And I think the number is less important than their coherence and effectiveness at arranging awards and punishments.
Corruption exists at all levels of government, even when it's a government of one.
Sundries is everything, so we pauperism to protected that there are values on what we are sex to fact our subscribers involved. Trait them vexed is one representation we staleness connectedness do!
<a href="http://www.abdominalpaingo.com/">abdominal pain</a>