The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us
"Thornton Wilder asks ' Do we live by accident and die by accident, or do we live by plan and die by plan? is one of universal importance.....the answer is both- we live by both accident and plan. Chance, luck, and randomness are present throughout our lives and the world around us."
"Perhaps this is the most important lesson about the random factor. It enables us to see ourselves and the world around us in a new light. it teaches us that there is a mysterious and ever-present energy to the world. The uncertainty of what lies around the corner is what give life much of its spark....After all, there is always a chance." Mark Robert Rank
"I make my own luck," is a popular quote from those who've made it in American society. But can we make ourselves more lucky, or is life just a series of random accidents that can propel us forward or backwards with little notice? We tend to discount the effects of luck in our own successes and overemphasize luck when we see others succeeding. But luck, good and bad, can happen to any of us and we ignore it at our own peril.
The concept of luck in life is the focus of a new book, The Random Factor by Mark Rank, a writer and professor of social welfare at Washington University in St. Louis. Rank is an expert in poverty and social justice and has developed a website, confrontingpoverty.org, that examines the risks and realities that poverty poses for all of us.
There are some who believe that all of life is produced by random collisions of matter that produce results along predictable rules of physics. There are others that believe in a Supreme Being who controls most of our destinies, leaving very little up to chance. Most of us are in the middle, trying to figure out how much of what we experience can be attributed to genetic makeup, environment, effort, or just dumb luck. This book takes the position that much of our genes, childhood, and environment are products of good or bad luck, and those things greatly determine our trajectories in life.
Some of us start from a privileged starting point, but many more start with a distinct disadvantage, and luck has a way of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Wealth tends to shield people from their own mistakes, bad decisions, and unlucky events, while poverty has the opposite effect. One unfortunately timed mistake by a poor person could send them to jail or worse, while they are more exposed to disease, crime, and money troubles. How can we hope to sort out what privileges are deserved and what are just dumb luck?
History is full of flukes and random events that changed the course of history. Had Adolph Hitler been admitted in the art academy he wanted to pursue in his youth, much of history would have changed. One phone call to Phyllis Schlafly about the Equal Rights Amendment convinced her to take a look at it and single-handedly defeat its passage in the 1970's. Rosa Parks deciding not to sit in the back of the bus ignited much of the civil rights movement. And all sorts of flukes have almost led to the end of the world through nuclear accidents, most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Many of the things that we now take for granted were invented by accident, including X-Rays, penicillin, pacemakers, chocolate chip cookies, Coca Cola, Viagra, Velcro, and potato chips. Progress is not a straight line from one discovery to another, but a random zig and zag that sometimes goes nowhere and sometimes rises to new levels.
Humanity's very existence is owed to the trajectory of an asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Had that asteroid hit elsewhere or missed the planet entirely, evolution would have taken a drastically different course. Weather and climate played a central role in determining what would survive and what wouldn't, and the random mutations of DNA that drove evolution provided the abilities of organisms to adapt no matter what the earth threw their way. In a way, we owe our modern environment to millions of random variations that paid off.
There are some elements of chance and luck that are out of our control, including where and when we are born, and the environment of our childhoods that greatly shapes us. Unfortunately, that first decade carries a heavy influence on the rest of our lives that is hard to overcome. Those who grow up around wealth and privilege see a much different world than do those who grow up around poverty and abuse. And those differences magnify and increase over a lifetime, making life more unfair and luck more influential than we'd like to admit.
As near as I can tell, the best way to combat the unfairness of all this is to try to even out the odds with repeated attempts and perseverance. In the view of the author, many of us are playing a rigged game of Monopoly where one player starts with thousands more dollars than we do and has the ability to scoop up all the best properties before we can. The book uses statistical analysis to show that the sports with many opportunities to score, like basketball rely less on luck and more on skill. Those with fewer opportunities to score like soccer and hockey depend a lot more on luck.
If you buy more lottery tickets, your odds of winning go up slightly, even if still terrible. If you apply to more selective endeavors like elite colleges and jobs, your odds of getting in get better, especially if you use feedback from the rejections to modify your attempts. When the odds are against you, probability becomes your best tool, as long as you are willing to accept reality and maximize the odds any way that you can.
Professor Rank ends the book with suggestions for how to deal with public policies around poverty and random chances. He uses philosopher John Rawls's famous veil of ignorance as a guiding principle. If everybody was able to set up a fair and just system before they were born, not knowing where they'd end up, what would they choose? Given this question, people would anticipate injustice more accurately. Thus the just society should have basic liberties guaranteed for everybody, as well as a robust social safety net for those whose luck takes a turn. And if we're going to accept inequality of outcomes, it must come with equality of opportunity- something that barely exists today.
According to a statistical model provided in the book, nearly 4 out of every 5 Americans will suffer some kind of economic insecurity (unemployment, government assistance, etc) during their lifetimes. Random setbacks can befall anyone, and stigmatizing poverty and bad luck only makes things harder. Rank's website has interesting tools that look at our risks of poverty and how the system is currently rigged. His earlier book, Chasing the American Dream, goes into much more detail about how hard it has become to escape the growing inequalities that define the US economy.
American society still puts a high premium on individualism, talent and effort being the driving forces that determine economic and political outcomes. But we ignore the huge impact that randomness, luck, and chance play in our lives, chalking good luck to good character and bad luck to someone being defective in some way. Luck is luck, and it happens to all of us, but with different outcomes. To minimize our vulnerability to bad luck, we need to prepare for the unexpected while building a growth mindset to learn from it and minimize damages going forward. And we will need more of a community outlook rather than every person for themselves if we are to weather the storms ahead.
I recommend this book, as well as Flukes, which I have reviewed previously on this blog. We all could use a bit more humility and reverence around the concept of randomness and luck. We could just as easily be living on a lizard planet right now, or digging out from a 1962 nuclear war. Instead, we have the imperfect world in front of us, and can do our best to make it a little better.
Comments