Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us

by Mark Robert Rank

Upending notions of predictability and rugged individualism to reveal how truly random the world is.
 
It’s comforting to think that we can be successful because we work hard, climb ladders, and get what we deserve, but each of us has been profoundly touched by randomness. Chance is shown to play a crucial role in shaping outcomes across history, throughout the natural world, and in our everyday lives. In The Random Factor , Mark Robert Rank draws from a wealth of evidence, interviews, and extensive research to explain how luck and chance play out, and reveals how we can use these lessons to guide our personal lives and public policies.
 
The Random Factor traverses luck from macro to micro, from events like the Cuban Missile Crisis to our personal encounters and relationships. From his perspective as a scholar of poverty, Rank also delves into the class and race dynamics of chance, emphasizing the stark disparities it brings to light. This transformative book prompts a new understanding of the twists and turns in our daily lives and encourages readers to fully appreciate the surprising world of randomness in which we live.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Audiobook, History

301 pages, Hardcover

Published April 23, 2024

Reviews

[Cav · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark."
—Bryce Courtenay, 1996

The Random Factor was an interesting look into the topic, but I had a few small gripes with the finished product. More below.

Author Mark Robert Rank is a social scientist and Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, known for his work on "poverty, social welfare, economic inequality and social policy." Rank is considered to be an expert in poverty studies.

Mark Robert Rank:


Rank opens the book with a decent intro, but it was very long. Clocking in at just shy of 45 mins, this was just too long for an intro, IMHO. Fortunately, the author writes with a decent style here that shouldn't struggle to hold the reader's attention. Accordingly, I found the book to be readable and engaging.

The author drops the quote above near the start of the book, and continues on below:

"Have you ever stopped to wonder how you arrived at where you are? Sit back for a moment and think about it. Ask yourself, “How did I end up at my current job, in this city or state or country, with these particular friends and family?” If you are like most people, you will probably think back to some of the major decisions you made throughout your life. You might consider the skills, interests, and talents you have acquired across the years. Perhaps you will recall the hard work and effort you have exerted in order to get to where you are. Undoubtedly, these are all important factors in helping to explain the specific twists and turns that have occurred in our lives.
But there is another factor that may be just as important. Yet it is the one element that we often forget when explaining our journey. It is the random factor."

Rank also drops this quote, speaking to the nature of "luck" and the aim of the book:

"Randomness is thus a constant companion as we live out our lives. It exerts its influence in ways that are obvious and not so obvious. In this book we explore the manner in which this companion walks beside us.
The topics of chance, luck, and randomness have been considered since antiquity. Written discourse regarding unexpected and chance events had its beginnings in ancient Greece. Indeed, the Greek gods of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades were thought to have drawn lots to determine which realm of the world they would rule over, with Zeus drawing the sky, Poseidon the seas, and Hades the underworld.8 Epicurus, Aristotle, Euripides, and other Greek philosophers grappled with whether there was such a thing as chance and / or whether the world operated by a knowable and constant set of laws."

This book is the 2nd one I've read on this exact topic, after Brian Klaas's book: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, which I really enjoyed, and would highly recommend.

The subject matter fielded here is fascinating. As Rank writes in the quote above; If you examine your own life, you will undoubtedly find that many of the larger events, people and circumstances you have experienced have been at least somewhat (and perhaps entirely) influenced by sheer luck. Zoom out, and you will also see that much of the Big History of the world has also turned on random happenstance.

Additionally, as Rank writes here; a relatively small change - positive or negative - can have a downstream cascade effect that can endure for the remainder of someone's life. A small fortunate incident can lead to bigger opportunities, which then snowball. Conversely, a small obstacle in the way of someone who is ill-equipped to deal with it can lead to a downward spiral.

He's got some very insightful writing here about this that I found simultaneously very interesting and terrifying. We're all (to one degree or another) susceptible to experiencing some bad luck that changes the trajectory of our lives. Towards the end of the book, he reiterates this point, and talks about the importance of gratitude. This writing really resonated with me, as I make gratitude a daily habit. It's too easy to take your blessings for granted. And you can always have it worse.

Some of the topics covered here include:
• Hitler denied acceptance to art school. Lived through 2 failed bomb assassination attempts
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Bad weather spares the Japanese city of Kookaburra from a nuclear bomb; dooms Nagasaki
• Nature, Nurture, or Chance?
• What’s in a Name?
• The Randomness of Birth Cohorts
• Who We Form Relationships With
• What We Do and What We Earn
• Where We Live
• Timing Is Everything
• Ripples and Currents
• Does Luck Even Out and Can It Be Influenced?
• A Robust Universal Safety Net
• Equality of Opportunity
• Humility and Empathy
• Gratitude

Unfortunately, there was a fair bit of leftist nonsense peppered throughout the writing here. This kind of shit is getting harder and harder to get away from. Which is unfortunate, especially for a book like this, because the insertion of too much of an author's shit political takes can really ruin the overall experience of the book.

The author has a slippery bit of writing about the 2014 death of Michael Brown. He insinuates that Brown was killed by the police for no reason, other than he was black. His death spawned the entire "Hands up! Don't shoot!" protests later that year. What was not as widely reported is that the actual story was twisted to the point of complete fiction. The incident was billed as showing a grade school-aged Brown's picture and headlines saying "Unarmed black teen shot by police."

Michael Brown (who was 6'4" and 292lb) was shot as he charged at a police officer, after a struggle over the officer's gun that saw 2 shots fired in his squad car. And contrary to the media narrative, he was not shot while his hands were in the air. The shot that killed him went through the top of his head, indicating that he was charging with his head down at the officer when he was shot.

Among the talk in the last part of the book, Rank also slyly slips in a few patent falsehoods. When talking about fairness and equality, he says: "For example, rather than making it harder to vote, particularly for persons of color and / or lower-income individuals (which has been the case in recent years), policy should be focused on creating greater access to voting." And: "...the right to live and reside in any residential community regardless of race..."

~ It is not harder for "persons of color" to vote. The same voter requirements exist for any citizen; regardless of their race. Further, in what may be an unpopular opinion - if you don't have your life together to the point where you at least possess a photo ID, then maybe you shouldn't have an equal say in how to run something as complex as a society. The ancient Greeks disliked the concept of Democracy for this very reason...
Also, people of any race already do have "the right" to live in any residential community they want. Whether they can afford to do so or not is another question. I'm pretty sure that preventing someone from living somewhere based solely on their race is illegal.

The bigger issue I have with all this virtue-signaling politicking is WTF it's doing in the book in the first place?? Authors should have the good sense to avoid inserting their personal political commentary and narrative into books, especially considering how polarizing the landscape has become recently.

Unfortunately, many of these academics reside in leftist echo chambers, and they have become ideologically captured. Just like an Evangelical Christian who never shuts up about Jesus, they just can't help themselves...


******************


The Random Factor was an interesting look into the topic; minus the little bits of political opining here and there.
I still would recommend it to anyone interested.
3.5 stars.

[Chris Boutté · Rating 5 out of 5]

There isn’t much to say about this book aside from that it’s an excellent book. I must admit that I’m a bit biased when it comes to this topic. I have a (potentially) unhealthy obsession with the topic of success vs. luck because we’re all taught in this individualistic culture that hard work means success, despite your circumstances. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and this book does a great job highlighting that fact.

If you’re like me and read a lot of books on this topic, there won’t be a ton of new information in here or topics, but there are some. The author has done his own research, which is great and super interesting. The other thing I really enjoyed about this book is that it gives the reader hope. I can get pretty bummed out knowing how much success is based on luck, but this book does a fantastic job giving tips for getting luck to work in your favor.

[Benjamin Burgis]

I'm going to be writing something about this for Jacobin soon but the very short version is that it's an interesting book that gets some important stuff right but could stand to be a little clearer about the conceptual distinctions about "luck" vs. free will vs. structural determination.

[Biggus · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am THIS close to ending this book before it starts. I've read (listened to) enough books to notice something. The longer it takes the author to start the book, and I am talking non-fiction here, the greater the likelihood of me not finishing it. I guess this is because authors who do this, tend to do other things that annoy me, and make me pull the pin before the end. This book runs 8.10, and doesn't actually start until the 43 minute mark. FORTY THREE MINUTES of this clown telling me what's coming up in the book. Here's a tip dude, just start the freaking book and let me read (listen to) it. How about that for a radical idea. Honestly, I was this close. Anyway, let's see how it plays out.

Three and a half hours of (some) interesting reading later... we feel the need to tell the reader what's coming up in the next chapters, again. Then babble on for a few more minutes. It's like a TV show... "and coming right up..." STOP IT. JUST GET ON WITH IT! I swear, if the book wasn't on a topic I am interested in, I would have thrown it against the wall by now. Honestly. Next time this happens, and it will, I will just stop.

The author may be an authority on randomness, but trust me, 'healthy' athletes don't drop dead. Unhealthy ones do, but to recognise this, you need to actually know how to tell the difference. You don't need to make up a complex theory to understand it either, just ask Mr Occam.

65% done, and I am done. After constantly being told what's in the next chapter, I am now subjected to a summary of what was in previous chapters. I could live with this if the book was even remotely engaging, but as his political persuasion becomes more obvious, and his constant references to far better authors in this field, (Pinker, Gladwell, Taleb, Mlodinow) abound, and as he drags out his simplistic and obvious Monopoly analogy, I just can't takes no more.

Read Malcolm Gladwell, learn more about this AND be entertained at the same time.

[Dan Connors · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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.

[Joan Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting topic that affects us all, yet I felt like the author was stating the obvious & I was left hoping for more.
On the technical front, I was disappointed that a book by a professor, published by a university press would contain jarring errors like “role of the dice” (context clearly calls for “roll”), and an incorrect title of Darwin‘s famous book on origin of species. In our automated world, there is still a place for a sharp-eyed human editor!

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good not mind blowing. Easy read. The world and each of us could be very different if it weren’t for randomness, chance and luck.

[MARC L'ESPERANCE · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good read, fast read, but not great great.

[Jim KABLE · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chance and Hope

To not recognise the Random nature of Life and the significance of Serendipity and Luck is to have a very blinkered and unrealistic perception. This book really forces the readers to re-evaluate how they have reached their present situation and circumstance. Excellent.

[Kelevilin Kimathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Random factor

The author delves on how chance plays a role in shaping our lives. This is an uncomfortable truth to many who believe that their success or lack of it depended on what they did or did not do. This book provides a humbling lesson that we should not boast about our achievements but should strive to create an environment where significant number of people can thrive.