Success and Luck
Wednesday, December 18
From Robert H. Frank’s Success and Luck:
So if you want to be smart and highly energetic, the most important single step you could take is to choose the right parents. But if you have such qualities, on what theory would it make sense for you to claim moral credit for them? You didn’t choose your parents, nor did you have much control over the environment in which you were raised.
You were just lucky.
Many people don’t like to work hard and also have limited endowments of cognitive abilities and other traits that are highly valued in the marketplace. In the competitive environments most of us inhabit, those people are unlucky.
In short, even if talent and hard work alone were enough to ensure material success – which they are not – luck would remain an essential part of the story. People with a lot of talent and an inclination to work hard are extremely fortunate.
Conversations about free will tend to focus on what could be called “first-order variables.” If you want to know how much control someone has over their choices, and therefore their life outcomes, you simply check the immediate environment for obvious external factors that would constrain their actions. In the absence of any obvious constraints, their actions must be downstream of their psychological traits (are they hard-working or lazy?), and therefore fully within their control. Or so the simplistic line of thinking goes.
But our psychological traits, too, are constrained by variables outside of our control — just further removed from the moment of action. Call them second-order variables.
We don’t choose to be hard-working or lazy; we just are that way. And we are that way thanks to a combination of genetics and environmental factors (and perhaps some randomness, too) over which we have no control. These second-order variables influence every aspect of our lives. Even if we can’t change then, we’d be well-advised to recognize them.