Sociologist Dalton Conley suggests using lotteries to counter the inequalities in the United States due to Americans sorting people into different locations:

As our society has become less random, it has become more unequal. Many people know that inequality has been rising steadily over time, but a less-remarked-on development is that there’s been a parallel geographic shift, with high- and low-income people moving into separate, ever more distinct communities. In 2019, the median household income in Washington, D.C., was $92,266. The corresponding figure for Mississippi was $45,792. Even locally, spatial differences are stark. New York City’s Fifteenth Congressional District, which covers the South Bronx, is the poorest in the nation, with a median income of thirty-one thousand dollars. The nation’s richest district, New York’s Twelfth, is just a mile or so to the south; it includes the Upper East Side and has a median income just shy of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Sorting occurs even in areas where people of multiple social classes overlap: people of different incomes often frequent different establishments on the same city block…

ut there’s another route to consider. What if, instead of paying taxes where we reside, and then reaping their benefits locally, we sprinkled taxation and revenues randomly—and therefore evenly—across the United States? What if, instead of paying a third of my taxes to New York City and State, I instead paid them to Pod No. 2,264—a group to which I was randomly assigned by a lottery the year I turned eighteen? What if, instead of camping out on the sidewalk the night before the school-enrollment date in hopes of getting my kids into a well-funded public school, I received a monthly check from Pod 2,264 that was meant to pay for my children’s schooling wherever I wanted to send them? In such a system, the retreat of affluent people from the places where they live doesn’t matter. In fact, it doesn’t matter where anybody lives. Nobody can escape contributing to the public sphere, no matter how far they move…

Some of us would lose in a more lottery-based society. But many of us would win. And we might end up being more compassionate toward one another; we’d be forced to acknowledge that much of our lot is the luck of the draw. We argue endlessly about the meaning of luck, even if we don’t always realize it. How much are we responsible for what happens in our lives? What’s the difference between luck and choice? How much should society try to help the unfortunate? Much psychological research shows that Americans who believe that luck plays a large role in our lives tend to be more liberal, supporting redistributive policies. Yet almost all of us seem to wish for a society in which luck plays no role, and in which everyone gets what they deserve, whether through their own actions or through mutual aid…

Despite this common goal, we tend to reach for lotteries only as a last resort, as President Nixon did when waging an unpopular war. We tell ourselves that we are successfully squeezing randomness out of life, by means of ever more refined algorithms and targeted social policies. But one lesson of our pod-based thought experiment is that we already live under the reign of lotteries—lotteries of birth, of location, of economic and social fate. We’ll never truly randomize America, but even entertaining the possibility can help us see that it can be useful to acknowledge randomness, and even to incorporate rolls of the dice into our collective life. What if, instead of trying to erase luck, we embraced it?

Since we do not control into which families, locations, and conditions we are born, there is some dimension of randomness from early ages. Some people have certain conditions, others have different conditions.

This also reminds me of the documentary Waiting for Superman. There, a lottery provides spots in a charter school for students and families who want opportunities. If I remember correctly, the message there is less about using a lottery to allocate scarce resources and more about suggesting that all children should be able to go to good schools.

How much would it take to get Americans to support such systems? Persistent in American ideology is the idea that people contribute greatly to their own outcomes. If people do not like the idea of random selections, would considering the possibilities of lotteries help people think about other ways of allocating resources or distributing opportunities?