I think some sort of community-involved decisionmaking could have reduced the risk of FLI. The community involvement could be on the process side instead of, or in addition to, the substantive side. Although there hasn’t been any answer on how much of a role the family member of FLI’s president played in the grant, the community could have pushed for adoption of strong rules surrounding conflict of interest.
Another model would be a veto jury empowered to nix tentatively approved grants that seemed poorly justified, too risky for expected benefit, or otherwise problematic. Even if the veto jury had missed the whole neo-nazi business, it very likely would have thrown this grant out for being terrible for other reasons.
I don’t think that is necessarily correct. We know the FLI grant was “approved” by September 7 and walked back sometime in November, so there was time for a veto-jury process without delaying FLI’s normal business process.
I am ordinarily envisioning a fairly limited role for a veto jury—the review would basically be for what US lawyers call “abuse of discretion” and might be called in less technical jargon a somewhat enhanced sanity check. Cf. Harman v. Apfel, 211 F.3d 1172, 1175 (9th Cir. 2000) (noting reversal under abuse of discretion standard is possible only “when the appellate court is convinced firmly that the reviewed decision lies beyond the pale of reasonable justification under the circumstances”).
It would not be an opportunity for the jury to comprehensively re-balance the case for and against funding the grant, or merely substitute its judgment for that of the grantmaker. Perhaps there would be defined circumstances in which veto juries would work with a less deferential standard of review, but it ordinarily should not take much time to determine that there was no abuse of discretion.
The “ceteris paribus” is the key part here, and I think in real life fast processes for deciding on huge sums of money tend to do much worse than slower ones.
If someone says that A is worse than B because it has a certain property C, you shouldn’t ask “Why is C bad?” if you are not disputing the badness of C. It would be much clearer to say, “I agree C is bad, but A has other properties that make it better than B on balance.”
I think some sort of community-involved decisionmaking could have reduced the risk of FLI. The community involvement could be on the process side instead of, or in addition to, the substantive side. Although there hasn’t been any answer on how much of a role the family member of FLI’s president played in the grant, the community could have pushed for adoption of strong rules surrounding conflict of interest.
Another model would be a veto jury empowered to nix tentatively approved grants that seemed poorly justified, too risky for expected benefit, or otherwise problematic. Even if the veto jury had missed the whole neo-nazi business, it very likely would have thrown this grant out for being terrible for other reasons.
I think that would hugely slow down the process.
I don’t think that is necessarily correct. We know the FLI grant was “approved” by September 7 and walked back sometime in November, so there was time for a veto-jury process without delaying FLI’s normal business process.
I am ordinarily envisioning a fairly limited role for a veto jury—the review would basically be for what US lawyers call “abuse of discretion” and might be called in less technical jargon a somewhat enhanced sanity check. Cf. Harman v. Apfel, 211 F.3d 1172, 1175 (9th Cir. 2000) (noting reversal under abuse of discretion standard is possible only “when the appellate court is convinced firmly that the reviewed decision lies beyond the pale of reasonable justification under the circumstances”).
It would not be an opportunity for the jury to comprehensively re-balance the case for and against funding the grant, or merely substitute its judgment for that of the grantmaker. Perhaps there would be defined circumstances in which veto juries would work with a less deferential standard of review, but it ordinarily should not take much time to determine that there was no abuse of discretion.
Why’s that bad?
Is it really that hard to think of reasons why a faster process may be better, ceteris paribus, than a slower process?
The “ceteris paribus” is the key part here, and I think in real life fast processes for deciding on huge sums of money tend to do much worse than slower ones.
If someone says that A is worse than B because it has a certain property C, you shouldn’t ask “Why is C bad?” if you are not disputing the badness of C. It would be much clearer to say, “I agree C is bad, but A has other properties that make it better than B on balance.”