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Success and Luck
Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
By ROBERT H. FRANK PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Robert H. Frank
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8027-0
CHAPTER 1
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW
Writers are told to "write what you know," and that's one reason I began writing about luck several years ago. I became interested in the subject in part because chance events have figured so prominently in my own life.
Perhaps the most extreme example occurred on a chilly November Saturday morning in 2007, when I was playing tennis at an indoor facility with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that as we sat between games early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying motionless on the court.
When he kneeled to investigate, he discovered that I wasn't breathing and had no pulse. He yelled out for someone to call 911, then flipped me onto my back and started pounding on my chest — something he'd seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. He says that after what seemed like forever, he got a cough out of me. Shortly after that an ambulance showed up.
Since ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than five miles away, how did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, about half an hour before I collapsed, two ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto accidents that had occurred close to the tennis center. Since the injuries involved in one of them weren't serious, one of the drivers was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred yards to get to me. The EMTs put the paddles on me, then rushed me to our local hospital. There I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger hospital in Pennsylvania, where they put me on ice overnight.
Doctors later told me that I'd suffered an episode of sudden cardiac death. They said that 98 percent of those who experience such episodes don't survive them and that most of the few who do are left with significant cognitive and other impairments. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I spoke nonstop gibberish from my hospital bed. But by day four I was discharged with a clear head. Two weeks later, after having passed the first cardiac stress test my doctors could schedule, I was playing tennis with Tom again.
If an extra ambulance hadn't happened to be nearby, I would not have survived. Some friends have suggested that I was the beneficiary of divine intervention, and I have no quarrel with those who see things that way. But that's never been a comfortable view for me. I believe I'm alive today because of pure dumb luck.
Not all chance events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Mike Edwards is no longer alive simply because chance frowned on him. He was the cellist in the original group that became the Electric Light Orchestra, the British pop band. He was driving on a rural road in England in 2010 when a thirteen-hundred-pound bale of hay rolled down a steep hillside and landed on top of his van, crushing him to death. He hadn't broken any laws that day. By all accounts, he was a well-liked, decent, and peaceful man. That his life was snuffed out by a runaway bale of hay was just bad luck, pure and simple.
Most people have no difficulty embracing the view that I'm lucky to have survived and that Edwards was unlucky to have perished. But in other domains, randomness often plays out in far more subtle ways, causing many of those same people to resist explanations that invoke luck. In particular, many seem uncomfortable with the possibility that success in the marketplace depends to any significant extent on luck.
A few years back I wrote a newspaper column describing how seemingly minor chance events figure much more prominently in life trajectories than most people realize. It was the first in a series of pieces I wrote that have gradually evolved into this book. I was surprised by the intense negative commentary the column generated, most of it from people who insisted that success is explained almost entirely by talent and effort. Those qualities are indeed highly important. But because the contests that mete out society's biggest prizes are so bitterly competitive, talent and effort alone are rarely enough to ensure victory. In almost every case, a substantial measure of luck is also necessary.
A few days after the column appeared, I was invited to appear on a Fox Business News show hosted by Stuart Varney, a man deeply skeptical about the importance of luck. Ever the optimist, I agreed, hoping that he and his viewers might find food for thought in the evidence I would describe.
Wrong. From start to finish during the segment, Varney was in high dudgeon. "Professor, wait a minute, do you know how insulting that was when I read that? I came to America with nothing thirty-five years ago. I've made something of myself, I think, with nothing but talent, hard work and risk taking. And you're going to write in the New York Times that this is luck?"
I tried to explain that that had not in fact been my message — that I'd written that although success is extremely difficult to achieve without talent and hard work, there are nonetheless many highly talented and hardworking people who never achieve any significant material success. But Varney's anger persisted. Spittle collecting at the corners of his mouth, he shouted, "You're saying that the American dream isn't really the American dream, it's not really there!" I tried to explain that I wasn't saying any such thing.
Varney: "Am I lucky being who I am and where I am?"
Me: "Yes! And so am I!"
Varney: "That's outrageous! Do you know what risk is involved coming to America with absolutely nothing? Do you know what risk is involved trying to work for a major American network with a British accent? A total foreigner? Do you know what risk is implied for this level of success?"
And on it went, for more than six excruciating minutes. It was only in my taxi leaving the studio that I realized all the easy rejoinders I'd failed to deliver. Varney came to America with nothing? Nonsense! I'd read the night before that he has a degree from the London School of Economics, which has always been a formidable credential in the American labor market.
Handicapped by a British accent? Oh, please! Americans love British accents! The British geologist Frank H. T. Rhodes became Cornell University's president shortly after I started teaching here in the 1970s. A friend once told me that Rhodes's Oxbridge accent was much stronger during his later years at Cornell than when he'd first arrived in the United States decades earlier. Certain other accents are socially disadvantageous, of course, and linguists have discovered that those tend to decay over time. But not the British accent.
Varney took risks! If I hadn't realized it on my own during my cab ride from the studio, the implication of that remark would have been hammered home to me by several e-mail messages I received later that day from friends. Taking a risk means that a successful outcome isn't certain. So if Varney took risks and was successful, he was lucky by definition! Too bad I didn't have the wit to point that out during our conversation on the air.
I've often wished I had the talent for thinking on my feet displayed by the protagonists in the novels of Elmore Leonard, long my favorite fiction author. Shortly after he died in 2013, NPR's Terry Gross aired excerpts from two of her earlier interviews with him. At one point she mentioned the uncanny verbal dexterity of his characters. In real life, she asked, can Leonard himself match their ability to deliver such snappy comeback lines?
He demurred: "Oh no ... never ..." It's different in writing, he explained: "... you end the scene with a line, the perfect line ... you have months to think about it."
Gross pressed him, wanting to know whether he mulled over his own conversations after the fact, trying to come up with clever replies he wished he'd thought of. And without missing a beat, Leonard offered this:
"Well, in real life, I'm sitting on a bench in Aspen, 4:00 in the afternoon, dead tired, I've come down the mountain, and a woman skis down, twenty-five, thirty years younger than I am, puts one boot up on the bench and says, 'I don't know what's more satisfying, taking off my boots or ...' and then she used an expression for sleeping with somebody."
Gross: "And you said ...??"
Leonard: "And I said, 'huh,' ... 'er,' ... 'ehh' ... and that was probably fifteen years ago," adding that he'd been trying ever since that day, without success, to come up with even a decent comeback line, never mind a snappy one.
It's hard to imagine a more pitch-perfect response to Gross's query. Did they rehearse that exchange? It didn't sound like it, and if not, it suggests that Leonard was actually pretty good at thinking on his feet. It's a talent I often lack. Most of the time, as in my conversation with Stuart Varney, the cost has been only some fleeting embarrassment. But occasionally it's been painful, and on one occasion, I was lucky to escape with my life.
I was windsurfing on Cayuga Lake on an extremely gusty afternoon, winds ranging from dead calm to more than forty miles an hour. To make it easier to hold the mast and sail upright in heavy wind, many windsurfers use a harness, which is just a life jacket with a hook in front that attaches to a loop of rope tied to the boom. (This apparatus lets the windsurfer's body weight do much of the work, relieving fatigue in the hands and arms.) After a brief lull, an especially strong gust blew through, catapulting me over the boom and sail. The next thing I knew, I was submerged under the sail, dazed but still conscious. As my head cleared, my first impulse was to release the hook from the rope so I could swim out from under the sail. But since my body had done several twists before hitting the water, the rope was wrapped too tightly around the hook for me to break free.
So I went to plan B, which was to push up hard on the sail above me, hoping to create some airspace between it and the lake surface. No progress with that, either, so I tried again to get the hook free from the rope. Again, no progress.
In full panic by this time and desperate for air, I made another futile attempt at the sail, then tried once more to disengage the hook. Again, failure. Hope fading, I tried the sail one more time. And that last effort produced a glorious sucking sound as air rushed up beneath it. I rose to the surface and breathed deeply for a few moments.
Once I calmed down, I saw what I should have seen right away: It wasn't necessary to free the hook from the rope. Simply by unzipping my life vest and removing it, I could have swum out from under the submerged sail. That's of course what I did, in the end. But not before almost drowning. Survival is sometimes just a matter of pure dumb luck, and I was clearly luck's beneficiary that day.
Stuart Varney and many others insist that people who amass great fortunes are invariably talented, hardworking, and socially productive. That's a bit of an overstatement — think of lip-synching boy bands, or derivatives traders who got spectacularly rich before bringing the world economy to its knees. Yet it's clear that most of the biggest winners in the marketplace are both extremely talented and hardworking. On this point, Varney is largely correct.
But what about the many talented and hardworking people who never achieve much material success? I often think of Birkhaman Rai, the young hill tribesman from Bhutan who was my cook long ago when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village in Nepal. To this day, he remains perhaps the most enterprising and talented person I've ever met. He could thatch a roof and repair an alarm clock. A skilled cook, he could also resole shoes. He could plaster a wall, after having made the plaster himself from cow dung, mud, and other free ingredients. He could butcher a goat. He could bargain tough with local merchants without alienating them.
Though he'd never been taught to read and write, there was almost no practical task in that environment that he couldn't perform to a high standard. Even so, the meager salary I was able to pay him was almost certainly the high point of his life's earnings trajectory. If he'd grown up in the United States or some other rich country, he would have been far more prosperous, perhaps even spectacularly successful. As the economist Branko Milanovic has estimated, roughly half of the variance in incomes across persons worldwide is explained by only two factors: country of residence and the income distribution within that country. As Napoleon Bonaparte once observed, "Ability is of little account without opportunity."
But if talent and hard work don't guarantee material success, I hope we can all agree that success is much more likely for people with talents that are highly valued by others, and also for those with the ability and inclination to focus intently and work tirelessly. But where do those personal qualities come from? We don't know, precisely, other than to say that they spring from some combination of genes and the environment (although recent work by biologists suggests that there may be important random influences here as well).
In some unknown proportion, genetic and environmental factors largely explain whether someone gets up in the morning feeling eager to begin work. If you're such a person, which much of the time I am not, you're fortunate. Similarly, your genes and your environment largely determine how smart you are. If you're smart, you're more likely to perform well at the tasks rewarded most lavishly by society, so there, too, you're lucky. As the economist Alan Krueger has noted, the correlation between parents' income and their children's income in the United States is a remarkably high 0.5 — about the same as the correlation between parents' height and their children's height. 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.
But luck's role in explaining differences in personal attributes is not my focus here. Instead, I want to describe what researchers have learned in recent years about the influence of external chance events and environmental factors on important individual life outcomes — influences that occur independently of people's virtues or flaws.
Having cheated death on at least two occasions obviously does not, by itself, make me an authority on luck. But it has instilled in me a keen interest in the subject and has stimulated me to learn much more about it than I otherwise would have. My personal experiences with chance events in the labor market have also spurred me to learn more about how such events shape career trajectories.
The influence of even seemingly minor random events is often profound. Is the Mona Lisa special? Is Kim Kardashian? They're both famous, but sometimes things are famous just for being famous. Although we often try to explain their success by scrutinizing their objective qualities, they are in fact often no more special than many of their less renowned counterparts.
Ahead I'll describe how success often results from positive feedback loops that amplify tiny initial variations into enormous differences in final outcomes. I'll also describe several individual case histories illustrating how even the most spectacular success stories could easily have unfolded very differently.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Success and Luck by ROBERT H. FRANK. Copyright © 2016 Robert H. Frank. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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