Books |
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
Thomas H. Frank
By
Published: Jun 14, 2018
Category:
Non Fiction
“Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.”
– E.B. White
Robert H. Frank is the HJ Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management — and the most successful popular economics writer in the world.
He considers himself extravagantly lucky. Like this:
I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court.
He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.
Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no serious injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.
Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac arrest. Almost 90 percent of people who experience such episodes don’t survive, and the few who do are typically left with significant impairments. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I spoke gibberish. But on day four, I was discharged from the hospital with a clear head. Two weeks later, I was playing tennis with Tom again.
If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead.
Question #1 on the pop quiz: Luck? Or destiny? Then answer the same question about this:
Mike Edwards is no longer alive because chance frowned on him. Edwards, formerly a cellist in the British pop band the Electric Light Orchestra, was driving on a rural road in England in 2010 when a 1,300-pound bale of hay rolled down a steep hillside and landed on his van, crushing him. By all accounts, he was a decent, peaceful man. That a bale of hay snuffed out his life was bad luck, pure and simple.
Robert Frank’s conclusion: In stories or success or failure. Luck matters. A lot. “I’m alive today because of pure dumb luck,” he says. But the lucky event doesn’t have to be dramatic to be major: “Seemingly minor chance events figure much more prominently in life trajectories than most people realize.”
“Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy” is a 150-page, anecdote-packed book that makes a strong philosophical case for gratitude and generosity. And a strong economic case for sharing the wealth. It’s also a powerful political argument for taxing the rich — indeed, it’s the ideal gift for friends and relatives who believe their success is all their doing, and that society’s losers just don’t try, or don’t care, or have some other flaw that keeps them from bootstrapping their way to prosperity, and so they feel completely justified in not wanting to pay taxes that might improve public schools and provide health insurance for the poor and…. but you know where this is going, don’t you? [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
It’s useful for successful people to deny they’re lucky. “Denying the importance of luck may actually help people surmount the many obstacles that litter almost every path to success.” It may, he says, actually help people summon the formidable efforts generally required for success. But… “If you want to be smart and highly energetic, the most important single step you could take is to choose the right parents.”
Consider Bill Gates:
Bill Gates is among the first to acknowledge that good luck played a huge role in his success, and there are lots of different dimensions of it. One was his training in high school. He attended one of the few high schools that had real-time, instant feedback on the computer programs that you submitted. When I was learning the program, we had to type up a card deck, we had to carry it up a steep hill, submit it to the computer center; two days later you’d get the results back. You’d discover that you had made some syntax errors and then two days later, you might finally get your program to run. He was one of the first people born when he was, and situated where he was in an affluent high school in Seattle, to be able to get instant feedback. He spent endless hours doing that and without that experience, he’s quick to acknowledge that he never would have been able to do the things he did.
Oddly, someone as rich as Gates feels the same way. Here’s Warren Buffett:
I’m extraordinarily well treated by this society, and I think most people with high incomes are. I think if you transported most of them to Bangladesh or Peru or something, they would find out how much of it is them and how much is the society….. I think society should figure out some way to make those who are particularly blessed, in a sense, that have talents that get paid off enormously in a market system, to give back a fair amount of that to the society that produces that.
Now that I’ve annoyed some of you, why don’t I serve up the woman who hammers this point home every chance she gets?
Politics? Or morality? Or are Professor Frank and his supporters simply… wrong? [For a critique of Frank’s conclusion and method, click here.]
Better question: Do you feel lucky? Do you?
