Everyone who buys a lottery ticket has an equal chance of winning. Which is marvellous when it comes to a Saturday night rollover but not so great when the stakes are higher, for instance deciding who goes to the best schools and universities.

Brighton and Hove City Council has become the first in England to allocate places in popular schools by lottery. According to a thoughtful analysis by the psychologist Barry Schwartz, the argument for higher education establishments to adopt a lottery admissions system is even greater. The idea is certainly no sillier than awarding university places on the basis of whether your parents donned a mortarboard.

Professor Schwartz, of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, is the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. When it comes to choice in education, his position is even more hardline — why none is best. If you have lots of candidates who meet the entry criteria, he writes in The Los Angeles Times, then trying to choose the best handful is “a fool’s errand”. Selectors “are assuming a level of precision of assessment that is unattainable”.

Schwartz bases this on something called the principle of the flat maximum: “What the principle argues is that when comparing the qualifications of people who are bunched up at the very top of the curve, the amount of inherent uncertainty in evaluating their credentials is larger than the measurable differences among candidates.”

He suggests that colleges try an experiment: in one year’s intake, select half the candidates in the usual way and the other half by lottery. Tracking the outcomes of these two groups would help to indicate whether admissions tutors do any better than a roll of the dice.

It would ease the pressure on kids to be the best, because being good enough would suffice. Who knows, it might even stir children into learning for the sheer joy of learning, rather than because they long to attend Harvard or Oxford.

– When I am struggling to write something, I notice that I need a vice about me; perhaps a chocolate bar or some other sugary temptation. During the exertions of typing, it is as if the mental reins are loosened elsewhere.

This came to mind when I read of the work of Suzanne Segerstrom and Lise Solberg Nes, at the University of Kentucky. They asked hungry volunteers to choose either a snack of cookies and chocolates, or carrots. They then asked the sated volunteers to solve some anagrams, some of which were impossible. Those who had eaten the carrots gave up soonest.

The researchers suggest that resisting the cookies depleted the mental resources left to deal with the anagrams. Interestingly, they also found that heart rate rose when volunteers were resisting the cookies. You know, just telling you this stuff has taken it out of me. I’m hitting the HobNobs.

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