Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

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Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy


Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy


Free Ebook Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

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Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success - and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.

Frank describes how, in a world increasingly dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones - and enormous income differences - over time; how false beliefs about luck persist, despite compelling evidence against them; and how myths about personal success and luck shape individual and political choices in harmful ways.

But, Frank argues, we could decrease the inequality driven by sheer luck by adopting simple, unintrusive policies that would free up trillions of dollars each year - more than enough to fix our crumbling infrastructure, expand healthcare coverage, fight global warming, and reduce poverty, all without requiring painful sacrifices from anyone. If this sounds implausible, you'll be surprised to discover that the solution requires only a few, uncontroversial steps.

Compellingly listenable, Success and Luck shows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies.

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Audible Audiobook

Listening Length: 5 hours and 19 minutes

Program Type: Audiobook

Version: Unabridged

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Audible.com Release Date: April 19, 2016

Whispersync for Voice: Ready

Language: English, English

ASIN: B01D8YJJOM

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In ancient times, philosophers started to ponder to what extent success depends on individual ability and effort, rather than fate or divine intervention. Nowadays we mostly categorize these external factors as chance or luck. Over the last 150 years in the U.S., the "Land of Opportunity" individualistic philosophy has emphasized the ability side. Academics take a more nuanced view, expressed well in an earlier book Dance with Chance: Making Luck Work for You (slightly edited).“Hard work, determination, education and experience count for a great deal as regards success. But the data available suggests that luck is almost entirely responsible for which hard working, determined, educated and experienced people make it in life.”Most accounts of this issue, such as Outliers: The Story of Success rely on stories. This book also has plenty of stories in which chance events led to success that seems unlikely without those events. But it is the first nontechnical book I've read that actually accompanies its stories with some account of “the data available". Part of this involves the “winner take all" parts of the current economy, where rewards accrue to only a few individuals. Part involves laboratory psychological experiments involving game-like settings where individuals are asked to make choices. And there are a few "toy model" mathematical simulations. I can confidently recommend this book as the best single treatment of its topic. Having said that, I do have a few quibbles.(a) The lab experiments involve short-term decision with negligible real-world consequences to the participants, so it’s mot clear how they apply outside the lab,(b) He notes that, after a point, acquisition of more wealth does not lead to more happiness. So it’s odd to use the word “success” to mean acquisition of wealth.(c) He proposes a progressive consumption tax, to reduce spending by the wealthy on positional goods (illustrated by expensive weddings and McMansions). But he makes no attempt to quantify the amount this would raise as taxes or reduce extravagance.(d) His mathematical models, combining “ability and effort” on one side with “pure luck” on the other side, miss a key point, which is the choice to undertake risky activity. When we look at the most successful people in a field, what we see is not just “ability plus luck”, but it’s “ability plus choice to take risks plus luck”.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of MeritocracyWorld War II was followed by thirty years of strong economic growth with no increase in economic inequality. This has been followed by forty years of slower growth with rapidly increasing inequality. Compelling evidence suggests that this sequence is counterproductive, not just for the poor and middle class, but for the wealthy themselves. Nevertheless, economic elites advance whatever arguments they can to justify their privileged status. One of these arguments is meritocracy, which is the claim that some combination of innate superiority, ability, and hard work justifies the enormous differences between their wealth and incomes and everyone else’s. In Success and Luck, Cornell economics professor Robert H. Frank examines this claim.Conservatives correctly observe that people who amass great fortunes are almost always extremely talented and hardworking. Liberals also correctly note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance events play a much larger role in this difference than once imagined. Nevertheless, it is human nature to underestimate and rationalize fortune’s role in one’s own success, while embracing bad luck as an explanation for failure. The dark side of this delusion is that those who are oblivious to their own advantages are often similarly oblivious to other people’s disadvantages and reluctant to pay the taxes required to support the investments for a good environment for everybody and to help the less fortunate.Obviously, large numbers of elites who inherited their wealth and opportunity have no claim to meritocracy. In addition, all children of high income parents have greatly enhanced prospects for success, regardless of actual inherited wealth. Children with low test scores and high income parents are more likely to achieve college bachelor’s degrees (30%) than children with high test scores and low income parents (29%) (see fig. 8.2). Nevertheless, elites who made their own fortunes generally are extremely talented and hard-working. Still, it’s one thing to say that 1% more talent or hard work merits 1% more income, but it’s quite another to say that magnification of these small personal performance differences by chance to thousands-fold differences in earnings is merited.In today’s winner-take-all markets technology enormously extends the reach of one or a few winners from a large pool of similarly talented, hard-working competitors, where luck often plays a pivotal role, so they can take all the gains. For instance, in the recording industry, 15% of sales are accounted for by the top one-thousandth of 1% of titles, and sales are less than 100 each for 94% of titles. Luck plays an important role in this process when critics with highly variable tastes eventually decide which titles will get air-time and the chance for success.Professor Frank illustrates this situation with a numerical simulation showing that when luck counts for only a tiny fraction of total performance, the winner of a large contest will seldom be the most skillful contestant, but will usually be one of the luckiest. Two factors are involved: 1) The inherent randomness of luck means the most skilled contestant is no more likely to be lucky than anyone else. 2) With a large number of contestants, there are bound to be many with close to the maximum skill level, and among those at least some will also happen to be very lucky. For instance, with 100,000 contestants where luck counts for only 2% and ability and effort count for 98%, 78% of winners do not have the highest score for ability and effort. The math and results of various combinations of luck with hard work and ability are shown in an appendix (see Fig A1.2).Examples are provided for small differences related to luck that influence outcomes. In professional hockey, 40% of players were born in the first three months and 10% were born in the last three months of the year, presumably because the traditional January 1 cut-off date for youth hockey gave the older players a better chance to be chosen for elite squads. Children born in summer months are the youngest in their classes and less likely to hold the high school leadership positions that are associated with higher wages later in life and better chances to become large company CEOs. Assistant professors of economics in top schools are more likely to be awarded tenure the earlier the first letter of their names appears in the alphabet, possibly because co-authors in economics publications are listed alphabetically. For eight representative track and field world records, seven were set with a tail wind (less than 2 m/ sec), one with no wind, and none with a head wind. Examples are also provided for the importance of chance in individual success of very talented and hard-working people like Bill Gates.The remainder of this small book (149 pages) discusses reasons for persistence of false beliefs about luck and talent and the consequences of those false beliefs, particularly with respect to increasing inequality and the lack of support for government programs and infrastructure. In the last part of the book, the author presents his case for replacing the progressive income tax with a progressive consumption tax that he thinks would better address these problems, although relevance to the rest of the book is weak.

I've read several of Dr. Franks' books and while this one echoes many of the same themes of his earlier works, it goes further in incorporating the element of luck into the discussion of economic success. He provides a number of great examples as to why our public service infrastructure needs to be repaired to the extent that all Americans can have better access to the basic advantages that will allow them to employ their talents, which will create a system that more closely resembles the meritocracy the successful claim already exists. I'm skeptical of some of his policy recommendations, but that is mere quibbling on my part. It's a really good book that reinforces the consistent message Franks has put forward throughout his authorial career.

It is to some extent a short autobiography of the author even if he says it isn't. There are not enough examples of good fortune vs. meritocracy.It is however an essay on a different tax system which is not what one gets at first glance when buying this book. A disappointment in that sense.

For the first 50 pages I kept saying to myself "yep been there" - I would change the words a little, luck is self created circumstance that comes back in a way that benefits you - the thesis is totally correct, so much success if we are honest is being in the right place at the right time with the right face and the right words. The secret is how to be in the right place and so on, and some of that is pure luck and some is being prepared to be there and risk rejection as well as acceptance. The greatest lesson is that as one door closes another opens that otherwise would have remained closed to you.

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