Over the weekend, New Yorkers finished voting in “participatory budgeting,” a way to invite residents to decide each year how to spend $1 million or so of their taxpayer money.
“Fake democracy” might be a better term, though. The process creates the illusion of good government rather than the reality of good government.
It started in the Third World in the late 1980s as a way to help poor people with no democratic experience navigate the new world that emerged when Cold War dictatorships ended.
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