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Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
From New York Times bestselling author and economics columnist Robert Frank, a compelling book that explains why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in their success, why that hurts everyone, and what we can do about itHow 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, noncontroversial steps.Compellingly readable, 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.
200 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 22, 2016
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3874 people want to read
About the author
Robert H. Frank
102 books184 followersRobert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and a Professor of Economics at Cornell University's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management. He contributes to the "Economic View" column, which appears every fifth Sunday in The New York Times.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 153 reviews
July 18, 2019
You've got to ask yourself one question -
Do I feel lucky?
Well, do ya, punk?
That’s a question we should all ask ourselves, and the answer (generally) is in the affirmative.
Because we are. Just the fact that you’re alive and reading this is evidence of that – plenty of people haven’t made it as far as you have, and plenty can’t afford, or access, the internet.
If you have a good job, good health, a happy childhood behind you, and live in a nation where your education and healthcare are free or subsidised (thanks, Australia!) then you’ve basically won the lottery. Any success you’ve had, while obviously influenced by your hard work, can’t help but be partly due to all the things on life that have gone your way, things that not everyone in our society has had the benefit of.
This seems elementary to me, but as Robert Frank points out in Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy the countervailing view – that success is completely down to individual hard work (and obviously that failure is due to corresponding negative qualities) is a common one.
This is particularly so in the richest, most powerful parts of Western society, the parts that ironically, have benefited the most from good fortune yet play down the benefits of such hard-luck beginnings as inheriting a New York real estate empire.
This of course seems part and parcel of the sociopathic neoliberal ideology so in vogue in our era, but Frank goes deeper, linking the downplaying of luck’s role to psychological coping mechanisms that motivate us to compete in fields where success is very unlikely (such as music, acting, etc.) without the reality of chance crushing our spirits before we even begin. This has however, the unfortunate effect of allowing us to take too much credit for our own success, something that can render us unsympathetic to the misfortunes of others who haven’t had our luck.
Correspondingly, people have a tendency to overplay luck’s role in their failures (even though it is often a factor) to explain their lack of success in a way that isn’t as corrosive to their motivation and sense of self.
Frank uses his own life to great effect in his exploration of luck’s influence. His lucky break in getting a job at Cornell. His luckily befriending an academic who led to his first big journal article getting published. His fortunate survival of a heart attack that should have killed him. Like all our lives, a series of luck-related events paved the way for him to be as he is now - a successful academic and writer.
There’s some real gold in here, and some fascinating information on studies where a greater appreciation for luck’s role in success, and a higher level of gratitude for the help one has received, correlates closely with more charitable attitudes to supporting others and maintaining social support systems.
As you can probably guess, there’s a political leanings issue in all this – those of us who ascribe more to personal agency and less to luck tend to lean toward the political right wing, while people who see the (seemingly accurate) role that luck plays generally trend left.
Anyway, it’s all pretty damn interesting, and well backed up with stats and graphs. Frank does wander off into the tax-policy weeds a bit toward the end though.
Were Frank to be acting out the role of Dirty Harry as referenced in the opening lines of this review the beginning of his punk-question would be “I know what you’re thinking. Did he go off on a consumption tax tangent, six times, or only five?”
Honestly, I just finished the book and I couldn’t answer that question. I lost count after the first pages-long diversion into Frank’s advocacy for a consumption tax. His argument is convincing, but it’s little dull, and my attention really started to wander every time the taxation talk started up again. It feels as though he shoe-horned a favorite hobby horse into the narrative and the book would have been stronger if he hadn’t.
Overall though, this is an illuminating read, even if it does lose some steam towards the end.
Three self-made billionaires with massive inheritances out of five.
Do I feel lucky?
Well, do ya, punk?
That’s a question we should all ask ourselves, and the answer (generally) is in the affirmative.
Because we are. Just the fact that you’re alive and reading this is evidence of that – plenty of people haven’t made it as far as you have, and plenty can’t afford, or access, the internet.
If you have a good job, good health, a happy childhood behind you, and live in a nation where your education and healthcare are free or subsidised (thanks, Australia!) then you’ve basically won the lottery. Any success you’ve had, while obviously influenced by your hard work, can’t help but be partly due to all the things on life that have gone your way, things that not everyone in our society has had the benefit of.
This seems elementary to me, but as Robert Frank points out in Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy the countervailing view – that success is completely down to individual hard work (and obviously that failure is due to corresponding negative qualities) is a common one.
This is particularly so in the richest, most powerful parts of Western society, the parts that ironically, have benefited the most from good fortune yet play down the benefits of such hard-luck beginnings as inheriting a New York real estate empire.
This of course seems part and parcel of the sociopathic neoliberal ideology so in vogue in our era, but Frank goes deeper, linking the downplaying of luck’s role to psychological coping mechanisms that motivate us to compete in fields where success is very unlikely (such as music, acting, etc.) without the reality of chance crushing our spirits before we even begin. This has however, the unfortunate effect of allowing us to take too much credit for our own success, something that can render us unsympathetic to the misfortunes of others who haven’t had our luck.
Correspondingly, people have a tendency to overplay luck’s role in their failures (even though it is often a factor) to explain their lack of success in a way that isn’t as corrosive to their motivation and sense of self.
Frank uses his own life to great effect in his exploration of luck’s influence. His lucky break in getting a job at Cornell. His luckily befriending an academic who led to his first big journal article getting published. His fortunate survival of a heart attack that should have killed him. Like all our lives, a series of luck-related events paved the way for him to be as he is now - a successful academic and writer.
There’s some real gold in here, and some fascinating information on studies where a greater appreciation for luck’s role in success, and a higher level of gratitude for the help one has received, correlates closely with more charitable attitudes to supporting others and maintaining social support systems.
As you can probably guess, there’s a political leanings issue in all this – those of us who ascribe more to personal agency and less to luck tend to lean toward the political right wing, while people who see the (seemingly accurate) role that luck plays generally trend left.
Anyway, it’s all pretty damn interesting, and well backed up with stats and graphs. Frank does wander off into the tax-policy weeds a bit toward the end though.
Were Frank to be acting out the role of Dirty Harry as referenced in the opening lines of this review the beginning of his punk-question would be “I know what you’re thinking. Did he go off on a consumption tax tangent, six times, or only five?”
Honestly, I just finished the book and I couldn’t answer that question. I lost count after the first pages-long diversion into Frank’s advocacy for a consumption tax. His argument is convincing, but it’s little dull, and my attention really started to wander every time the taxation talk started up again. It feels as though he shoe-horned a favorite hobby horse into the narrative and the book would have been stronger if he hadn’t.
Overall though, this is an illuminating read, even if it does lose some steam towards the end.
Three self-made billionaires with massive inheritances out of five.
May 10, 2016
This book is a mixed bag of goodness, thought provocation, and then a seemingly random diversion into tax policy. There are some great dinner party conversation starter ideas contained herein, and if you have ever given this topic any thought, this is worth the time.
In my own personal self-evaluation of the last couple of years, I have been reflecting deeply on the role of seemingly inconsequential acts from unintended benefactors have shaped my future success. There is no doubt, then, that luck has played a very significant role in my own life. It's very easy, as a product of an elite education system, to come to the conclusion that all success has been earned through hard work. However, as Frank writes in this book, the resultant success of any one individual is undoubtedly the product of collective effort and luck.
The sojourn into tax policy felt strange and out of place in this book. That has more to do with my own expectations which I brought to reading it. I can see, however, how Frank would use the notion of luck as a foil for projecting the need for a very progressive tax policy change. I will admit, I had to this point never considered how a progressive consumption tax implementation would impact society; at least not as he has postulated. Frame of reference and comparisons drive action in a competitive society, into which (like it or not) homo sapiens have evolved. By reducing the overall levels of comparisons, such that no one individual feels worse off relative to the masses, Frank argues that wasteful spending could be curtailed and tax dollars (or otherwise) could be put to more effective uses. I will think on this in the coming months.
The other core pillar of this book is the notion that as borders and spheres of influence have been rendered effectively meaningless, the notion of winner take all (or, as my preferred model - winner take most) in a competitive environment is more likely to occur, where the economic benefits accrue to fewer and fewer players. Thus, the notion of luck is all the more important, since the series of seemingly random interactions which ultimately result in success are, by definition, highly improbable.
Unfortunately, this notion denudes that hard work and effort matter. Perhaps Frank truly believes that these are prerequisites for success, and his model of winner take all due to the ability to accrue more winnings from ever farther reaches in a resource constrained environment means that we must all work harder than ever, though it will matter less and less, as fewer and fewer winners take more and more.
This is a quick read with some interesting ideas. The referenced experiment at the end of the book does not produce (by his own admission) statistically significant results, and yet he uses them to drive home his conclusions and close out the book. This seemed like a strange editorial decision to me. The detour into a tax policy discussion, ostensibly supported by the premise argument of the book, is an odd one, though makes sense if his plan was to in fact use this book as a platform for driving a discussion of progressive consumption tax. Make people feel bad about what they have, tell them that no one will be worse off if the collective frame of reference remains unchanged, and drive non-productive spending back into infrastructure.
In my own personal self-evaluation of the last couple of years, I have been reflecting deeply on the role of seemingly inconsequential acts from unintended benefactors have shaped my future success. There is no doubt, then, that luck has played a very significant role in my own life. It's very easy, as a product of an elite education system, to come to the conclusion that all success has been earned through hard work. However, as Frank writes in this book, the resultant success of any one individual is undoubtedly the product of collective effort and luck.
The sojourn into tax policy felt strange and out of place in this book. That has more to do with my own expectations which I brought to reading it. I can see, however, how Frank would use the notion of luck as a foil for projecting the need for a very progressive tax policy change. I will admit, I had to this point never considered how a progressive consumption tax implementation would impact society; at least not as he has postulated. Frame of reference and comparisons drive action in a competitive society, into which (like it or not) homo sapiens have evolved. By reducing the overall levels of comparisons, such that no one individual feels worse off relative to the masses, Frank argues that wasteful spending could be curtailed and tax dollars (or otherwise) could be put to more effective uses. I will think on this in the coming months.
The other core pillar of this book is the notion that as borders and spheres of influence have been rendered effectively meaningless, the notion of winner take all (or, as my preferred model - winner take most) in a competitive environment is more likely to occur, where the economic benefits accrue to fewer and fewer players. Thus, the notion of luck is all the more important, since the series of seemingly random interactions which ultimately result in success are, by definition, highly improbable.
Unfortunately, this notion denudes that hard work and effort matter. Perhaps Frank truly believes that these are prerequisites for success, and his model of winner take all due to the ability to accrue more winnings from ever farther reaches in a resource constrained environment means that we must all work harder than ever, though it will matter less and less, as fewer and fewer winners take more and more.
This is a quick read with some interesting ideas. The referenced experiment at the end of the book does not produce (by his own admission) statistically significant results, and yet he uses them to drive home his conclusions and close out the book. This seemed like a strange editorial decision to me. The detour into a tax policy discussion, ostensibly supported by the premise argument of the book, is an odd one, though makes sense if his plan was to in fact use this book as a platform for driving a discussion of progressive consumption tax. Make people feel bad about what they have, tell them that no one will be worse off if the collective frame of reference remains unchanged, and drive non-productive spending back into infrastructure.
September 17, 2016
Um livro curto mas muito bom, com a melhor discussão de meritocracia que já encontrei. O autor faz uma grande discussão sobre porque tendemos a achar mais que o nosso sucesso é devido apenas à competência pessoal conforme ganhamos mais. Também fala sobre o papel da chance e de infraestrutura para alguém poder dar certo.
Tudo isso para argumentar por um tipo diferente de taxação para os mais ricos (que é a área de pesquisa do autor). Não foi bem pelo que li o livro, mas também é uma lição legal. Principalmente porque ele leva bastante em conta como status é um atributo relativo, ou seja, mesmo com todos ganhando menos, ricos ainda teriam o mesmo status que tem.
A proposta do autor é escrever somente o necessário e foi bem o que ele fez. Tem pouca redundância com outros livros que já li e fiquei querendo mais. Complementos legais: O andar do bêbado falando sobre o papel da chance no sucesso e The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence falando sobre a perda de empatia que acontece com o ganho de poder.
Tudo isso para argumentar por um tipo diferente de taxação para os mais ricos (que é a área de pesquisa do autor). Não foi bem pelo que li o livro, mas também é uma lição legal. Principalmente porque ele leva bastante em conta como status é um atributo relativo, ou seja, mesmo com todos ganhando menos, ricos ainda teriam o mesmo status que tem.
A proposta do autor é escrever somente o necessário e foi bem o que ele fez. Tem pouca redundância com outros livros que já li e fiquei querendo mais. Complementos legais: O andar do bêbado falando sobre o papel da chance no sucesso e The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence falando sobre a perda de empatia que acontece com o ganho de poder.
May 13, 2019
Whether or not you want to acknowledge the role of luck in your life, it is there, argues Frank in Success and Luck. 7 of 8 world record holders in track had tailwinds at their back the day they broke their record. 7 of the 8 previous world record holders also had a tailwind pushing them along. And if you are wealthy in America, you won the lottery of birth that situated you in a society in which hundreds of years of investment in infrastructure, education, institutions and social capital set the preconditions that made your wealth possible.
There are psychological reasons perhaps why people downplay the role of luck in their success. Frank posits that people tend to downplay luck because, if luck the reason some people succeed over others, that belief could discourage people from doing the hard work to overcome the obstacles to their goals. He also notes that people tend to overestimate the role of bad luck when failure occurs. This bias lets us off the hook when we haven't met our goals.
This book is an interesting meditation on luck written for a particular audience - the well-to-dos who'd rather not pay their taxes. See my longer review here.
There are psychological reasons perhaps why people downplay the role of luck in their success. Frank posits that people tend to downplay luck because, if luck the reason some people succeed over others, that belief could discourage people from doing the hard work to overcome the obstacles to their goals. He also notes that people tend to overestimate the role of bad luck when failure occurs. This bias lets us off the hook when we haven't met our goals.
This book is an interesting meditation on luck written for a particular audience - the well-to-dos who'd rather not pay their taxes. See my longer review here.
December 31, 2023
I'm usually annoyed by the whole "does just what it says on the tin" thing, but that's a pretty accurate summation of this book - it promises a look at the empirical research on the role of luck in success, and finds (surprise!) that luck is in fact very influential on who succeeds and who doesn't. This has always been commonsensical to me, but it's important to have rigorous research justification for that point, and Frank has provided it. There's a few pointless anecdotes and the approach is very plain, but this book does what it needs to do to function the way that it should. Anybody of a progressive bent should have access to these facts.
October 31, 2017
I should mail a hard copy of this to my father and ever other Republican family member I possess.
It's a fantastic and inoffensive approach to introducing a way of thinking that, frankly, goes counter to the exact "reasoning" that led to our current president being in office and the continued myth of Reaganomics.
I don't really have any criticism to discuss other than a tendency to repeat himself, sometimes verbatim, at the end of chapters. At best I have minor critiques of writing like that, none of the material. Instead, I'll share how this affected me personally and why this message resonates.
I think I was fortunate. I grew up as lucky as any of these people described in this book, and had every privilege afforded by being born to the right parents. Then from about 17 to 23, the Universe decided "fuck that guy in particular".
There were some self-inflicted wounds, like my bitterness that the sacrifices I had made in high school to get into MIT or Caltech got me no farther than Florida Tech, and that school's handling of my 36 AP credits (I had to retake all but 6 of those credits anyway, they only counted as generic "transfer credit" for electives, so what was the point), but I ran into some bad luck, plain and simple.
Just not getting into those schools was caused in no small part by where we had moved when I was in third grade. Though NY schools are the best in the country, we moved to the smallest district on Long Island; my graduating class was around 150, compared to the 1500+ in districts like Sachem. There simply weren't enough people to justify offering more AP courses, more clubs, more sports. I did literally everything that was offered.
I had a 3.9 GPA (4.4 weighted). I took all but one AP course (European History), even getting a special waiver (that was not easy to get) to allow me to take on a schedule in my senior year without a lunch period so I could take both Marine Biology (the only science elective the school offered) and still fit in AP American History, AP English, and AP Physics, as both Physics and Marine Bio were 2-period classes (we had 9 period days).
This is a year most seniors with my GPA were afforded "senior privilege", wherein you could elect to skip 1st period and come in late (I was in orchestra from 2nd grade onward, which is always 1st period, so not an option), skip 9th period and go home early (the double-period AP sciences were always 8th and 9th period, and as I was planning to MAJOR in physics, that was not an option to forego AP Physics), or have a second lunch period.....I didn't even have ONE!
I was in every academic club: Science Olympiad (made states or 1st alternate every year despite not having any resources other schools have, like massive dedicated budgets or multiple teams), Academic Decathlon (not quite as successful, this club struggled from lack of interest and a good advisor), National Honor Society, Pit Orchestra for the theater, Chamber Orchestra (an extra after-school group who gave up 3 evenings a week to rehearse), and I was on the varsity Bowling team (the only sport I could really do after my injuries in middle school). I volunteered at the local Salvation Army processing donated computer equipment and setting it up for use by their eventual recipients.
From 15 onward I had a job. I started as a magician/general performer for a neighbor's party entertainment company...how lucky to have those neighbors and have my magic act randomly come up in a conversation they had with my dad? This meant I didn't have weekends, both Saturday and Sunday began at 5am loading equipment into a van, driving all over the state and performing for 14+ hours, then unloading the van at 10pm. But I made more in two days than any of my friends did in a month!
When they moved 30 miles away (how unlucky!), I couldn't drive yet (my father made me wait to get my permit and license, for some reason), so I got a job at a photo lab. I was supposed to be just another cashier, but someone quit unexpectedly (more luck for me!), so the manager thought since I was smart I'd be able to pick it up faster than they could find a suitable new hire (again, I was extremely fortunate here, they should have hired someone with experience).
Unfortunately, that luck turned around and they severely screwed up some time off issues surrounding the legally required visitation periods with my mom, so I jumped ship to the Blockbuster that also happened to be hiring that same time right next door (another stroke of luck for many reasons). I got a pay raise (it wasn't as much as I'd been making doing parties, which was $10/hr plus maybe $300 in tips per weekend, but $8/hr was way beyond what any of my peers made), the job was much easier, and I got both free movie rentals and a new friend (my one male manager latched onto me as the only other guy working there) who introduced me to the world of cinema and kindled a love of movies that led me to eventually make my own.
Throughout all of this, I had my responsibilities at home: taking care of a dozen animals (we basically had a zoo), cleaning, chopping wood. I listened to physics lectures while I chopped, though my family bullied me incessantly for habits like that. I was doing everything that I could to prepare for a career in physics.
I was raised to expect that hard work and skill were the only factors that mattered. My father would disagree violently with every idea in this book, and so would young 17 year old me awaiting response letters from colleges. Then I got rejection, after rejection, after rejection. I got into Florida Tech and Worcester Polytech (and SUNY Albany, despite the fact that I didn't even bother finishing the application after I got my first acceptance in the mail and knew I didn't need a safety school anymore). Only the former gave me any scholarship award, and it was conveniently as far away from my family as possible.
My hard-earned AP credits didn't allow me to basically skip my first two semesters of boring prerequisites, as was the plan, they were only accepted as generic transfer credit. Being shoved into repeating Calculus, Physics 1, Composition & Rhetoric (writing course AP English should have covered), Chemistry, Biology.....it left me bitter and led to laziness. I didn't have to try when it was a class I'd already excelled at, and it set me up for a struggle later when things actually got hard. In short, it broke my spirit, as it was completely beyond my control despite all of my previous hard work and sacrificing any high school social life I could have had.
This was my first taste of the idea that the world owes me nothing. I could try as hard as I wanted and be better than everyone I saw, but still just a bit of bad luck one day could undo it all. Had I simply moved into a school district 15 miles north, I may have had a slightly different spread of AP classes (more science, fewer humanities), maybe an extra club or two, or an extra sport, and suddenly I'm at MIT with a full scholarship instead of drowning in debt at FIT. Maybe a reviewer of applications one day was a hardcore Star Trek fan and I referenced Star Wars in my essay on that one. Who knows.... All I do know is I did everything that was within my powers as a teenager, and I failed.
In college, this trend continued.....
Our class was kind of a lost generation, in my department. We came in during a seismic shift in departmental power, and as such we didn't get a lot of guidance. No one told us what an REU program was, but just two classes after us there was a daily bombardment of departmental emails advertising opportunities. We were told not to seek research experience with faculty until our junior year, but the class after us was told to start right away....so by the time we were juniors, all of the labs were already full of students a year behind us and there was no room.
We simply got lost in the shuffle of administrative changeover, and today, only two of my graduating class is employed in our field; only one that I know of got a PhD, out of a class of 25 (a more typical ratio for this field is about 1 in 3 or 4).
Similarly, we graduated at the tail end of the Bush administration and the Great Recession. There were no jobs for physicists without doctorates and 10 years of prior experience. A quirk of the timing of our birth meant that 90% of us had to scramble to find marketable skills in other fields quickly. I ended up as a wedding photographer, veterinary technician, high school math teacher, and eventually software engineer. Others in my class are teachers, some are even working in retail to this day.
But here's the big twist: I should never have gotten my first programming job! I was forced to reluctantly learn Python during my Master's degree program. My advisor (Hakeem Oluseyi, who some of you may recognize if you ever watch the Discovery or Science channels) didn't know my primary language, C++, and had the power to make me adapt rather than having to work a little harder to understand my code. I was annoyed at the time, but little did I know how much that would change the entire course of my life.
An advertisement came up when I was searching for math-related jobs here in Melbourne, looking for someone who knew Python and statistics. Perfect! Except it also wanted MySQL, Javascript, experience with the Django framework, etc. That was iffy, I hadn't even heard of half of those things!
But I bulshitted a cover letter and sent in a resume and landed an interview. It turns out the owner, a man named Colin Delia, had an incredibly similar history to mine. He was wealthy and had attended Princeton....for physics! We shared our hero-worship of Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson. He had also dabbled in teaching briefly. In the end, I was hired despite my complete lack of qualification for the position because he wanted another friend, and he believed my assertions that physicists were trained to learn quickly and adapt.
That's not to say he was wrong or I was completely talking out of my ass. I learned in a year what many go to school for four years to learn in a computer science degree. Near the end, I accidentally stumbled upon the idea of genetic algorithms in designing a way to automatically generate new symbol sequences for the virtual slot machine reels such that the payout distribution fit a desired pattern. I was thrown to the lions (or rather did everything I could to sneak into the cage myself) and survived.
But the point is that's how I got to where I am now, about to cross the threshold of a six-figure income, from seemingly-hopeless poverty and relying on a charity organization to not become homeless at one point.
Luck robbed me of advancement on my own merit and broke my spirit. But luck also brought me back and gave me a job that I should never have gotten on my own.
What are the odds that there is a programming job available within ten miles of where I was living (in an area, as I learned, where the predominant programming languages are C++, Java, and ASP/.NET)? Then what are the odds that the owner of the company advertising it also went to school for physics, and very near to NYC so we had so much in common culturally? Then what are the odds that we've read the exact same books and had been initially interested in the same sub-field? Then what are the odds that this business owner decides to take a chance and make an objectively bad decision to hire someone with no qualifications simply because we got along personally?
Don't get me wrong. As this author stresses repeatedly, hard work and uncommon skill are prerequisites to even be in the position to take advantage of such a lucky break. I worked harder in that year with Colin than I ever had in my life, and if I hadn't I would have been right back where I started. But never can I pretend that I got where I am today simply by my own hand. If that had happened, I would have taken an incredibly different career trajectory. Or, what would have happened if I had never been able to find that programming job? Where would I have ended up, since surely no other manager would have looked twice at my resume without that personal connection?
Similarly, luck continues to mess with me. I mentioned "a year" with Colin? Turns out he was just using me as a stop-gap; in the agreement to acquire the company from his partners, he had to sign a non-compete to not poach his former lead developer from them. The day that expired, I was fired and that guy came back. Then, 8 months later, the very week I ran out of money and unemployment compensation, I got a local job at GFS....once again despite having zero experience with any of the technology they used. The next day, my girlfriend gets into the PhD program here at FIT and has to move back to Melbourne....after I just got a job that locks me into Grand Rapids. Then, weeks later, the DAY I dropped a deposit check to take over the shared lease by myself, I finally got an offer for a remote programming position that allowed me to move as well.
I think because I started with everything, lost it all, and then got it all back, all through amazing twists of fate, it makes me appreciate the message of this book all the more. I'm happy to pay a larger sum in taxes today than my entire pre-tax salary as a teacher, because I was once the recipient of benefits and assistance that allowed me to claw my way back to solvency. I don't take for granted how fragile my career has been; it makes me grateful to have such a nice job, but at the same time it makes me fight harder for what I (and my coworkers) deserve. It makes me take even greater offense when "job creators" complain when asked to pay their fair share, and try to short us workers so they can have just a little bit more.
I wholeheartedly support this author's proposal for a progressive consumption tax! And I respect the rational way he laid out that premise. I think this book should be mandatory reading for everyone who loves to wax nostalgic about how hard work got them where they are today.
Hard work DID get me where I am today...but so did incredible luck, both good and bad, and my reliance on others' investment in government programs that kept my afloat through those turbulent years. I will never forget that.
To quote my favorite comedian's late wife: "It's chaos. Be kind."
It's a fantastic and inoffensive approach to introducing a way of thinking that, frankly, goes counter to the exact "reasoning" that led to our current president being in office and the continued myth of Reaganomics.
I don't really have any criticism to discuss other than a tendency to repeat himself, sometimes verbatim, at the end of chapters. At best I have minor critiques of writing like that, none of the material. Instead, I'll share how this affected me personally and why this message resonates.
I think I was fortunate. I grew up as lucky as any of these people described in this book, and had every privilege afforded by being born to the right parents. Then from about 17 to 23, the Universe decided "fuck that guy in particular".
There were some self-inflicted wounds, like my bitterness that the sacrifices I had made in high school to get into MIT or Caltech got me no farther than Florida Tech, and that school's handling of my 36 AP credits (I had to retake all but 6 of those credits anyway, they only counted as generic "transfer credit" for electives, so what was the point), but I ran into some bad luck, plain and simple.
Just not getting into those schools was caused in no small part by where we had moved when I was in third grade. Though NY schools are the best in the country, we moved to the smallest district on Long Island; my graduating class was around 150, compared to the 1500+ in districts like Sachem. There simply weren't enough people to justify offering more AP courses, more clubs, more sports. I did literally everything that was offered.
I had a 3.9 GPA (4.4 weighted). I took all but one AP course (European History), even getting a special waiver (that was not easy to get) to allow me to take on a schedule in my senior year without a lunch period so I could take both Marine Biology (the only science elective the school offered) and still fit in AP American History, AP English, and AP Physics, as both Physics and Marine Bio were 2-period classes (we had 9 period days).
This is a year most seniors with my GPA were afforded "senior privilege", wherein you could elect to skip 1st period and come in late (I was in orchestra from 2nd grade onward, which is always 1st period, so not an option), skip 9th period and go home early (the double-period AP sciences were always 8th and 9th period, and as I was planning to MAJOR in physics, that was not an option to forego AP Physics), or have a second lunch period.....I didn't even have ONE!
I was in every academic club: Science Olympiad (made states or 1st alternate every year despite not having any resources other schools have, like massive dedicated budgets or multiple teams), Academic Decathlon (not quite as successful, this club struggled from lack of interest and a good advisor), National Honor Society, Pit Orchestra for the theater, Chamber Orchestra (an extra after-school group who gave up 3 evenings a week to rehearse), and I was on the varsity Bowling team (the only sport I could really do after my injuries in middle school). I volunteered at the local Salvation Army processing donated computer equipment and setting it up for use by their eventual recipients.
From 15 onward I had a job. I started as a magician/general performer for a neighbor's party entertainment company...how lucky to have those neighbors and have my magic act randomly come up in a conversation they had with my dad? This meant I didn't have weekends, both Saturday and Sunday began at 5am loading equipment into a van, driving all over the state and performing for 14+ hours, then unloading the van at 10pm. But I made more in two days than any of my friends did in a month!
When they moved 30 miles away (how unlucky!), I couldn't drive yet (my father made me wait to get my permit and license, for some reason), so I got a job at a photo lab. I was supposed to be just another cashier, but someone quit unexpectedly (more luck for me!), so the manager thought since I was smart I'd be able to pick it up faster than they could find a suitable new hire (again, I was extremely fortunate here, they should have hired someone with experience).
Unfortunately, that luck turned around and they severely screwed up some time off issues surrounding the legally required visitation periods with my mom, so I jumped ship to the Blockbuster that also happened to be hiring that same time right next door (another stroke of luck for many reasons). I got a pay raise (it wasn't as much as I'd been making doing parties, which was $10/hr plus maybe $300 in tips per weekend, but $8/hr was way beyond what any of my peers made), the job was much easier, and I got both free movie rentals and a new friend (my one male manager latched onto me as the only other guy working there) who introduced me to the world of cinema and kindled a love of movies that led me to eventually make my own.
Throughout all of this, I had my responsibilities at home: taking care of a dozen animals (we basically had a zoo), cleaning, chopping wood. I listened to physics lectures while I chopped, though my family bullied me incessantly for habits like that. I was doing everything that I could to prepare for a career in physics.
I was raised to expect that hard work and skill were the only factors that mattered. My father would disagree violently with every idea in this book, and so would young 17 year old me awaiting response letters from colleges. Then I got rejection, after rejection, after rejection. I got into Florida Tech and Worcester Polytech (and SUNY Albany, despite the fact that I didn't even bother finishing the application after I got my first acceptance in the mail and knew I didn't need a safety school anymore). Only the former gave me any scholarship award, and it was conveniently as far away from my family as possible.
My hard-earned AP credits didn't allow me to basically skip my first two semesters of boring prerequisites, as was the plan, they were only accepted as generic transfer credit. Being shoved into repeating Calculus, Physics 1, Composition & Rhetoric (writing course AP English should have covered), Chemistry, Biology.....it left me bitter and led to laziness. I didn't have to try when it was a class I'd already excelled at, and it set me up for a struggle later when things actually got hard. In short, it broke my spirit, as it was completely beyond my control despite all of my previous hard work and sacrificing any high school social life I could have had.
This was my first taste of the idea that the world owes me nothing. I could try as hard as I wanted and be better than everyone I saw, but still just a bit of bad luck one day could undo it all. Had I simply moved into a school district 15 miles north, I may have had a slightly different spread of AP classes (more science, fewer humanities), maybe an extra club or two, or an extra sport, and suddenly I'm at MIT with a full scholarship instead of drowning in debt at FIT. Maybe a reviewer of applications one day was a hardcore Star Trek fan and I referenced Star Wars in my essay on that one. Who knows.... All I do know is I did everything that was within my powers as a teenager, and I failed.
In college, this trend continued.....
Our class was kind of a lost generation, in my department. We came in during a seismic shift in departmental power, and as such we didn't get a lot of guidance. No one told us what an REU program was, but just two classes after us there was a daily bombardment of departmental emails advertising opportunities. We were told not to seek research experience with faculty until our junior year, but the class after us was told to start right away....so by the time we were juniors, all of the labs were already full of students a year behind us and there was no room.
We simply got lost in the shuffle of administrative changeover, and today, only two of my graduating class is employed in our field; only one that I know of got a PhD, out of a class of 25 (a more typical ratio for this field is about 1 in 3 or 4).
Similarly, we graduated at the tail end of the Bush administration and the Great Recession. There were no jobs for physicists without doctorates and 10 years of prior experience. A quirk of the timing of our birth meant that 90% of us had to scramble to find marketable skills in other fields quickly. I ended up as a wedding photographer, veterinary technician, high school math teacher, and eventually software engineer. Others in my class are teachers, some are even working in retail to this day.
But here's the big twist: I should never have gotten my first programming job! I was forced to reluctantly learn Python during my Master's degree program. My advisor (Hakeem Oluseyi, who some of you may recognize if you ever watch the Discovery or Science channels) didn't know my primary language, C++, and had the power to make me adapt rather than having to work a little harder to understand my code. I was annoyed at the time, but little did I know how much that would change the entire course of my life.
An advertisement came up when I was searching for math-related jobs here in Melbourne, looking for someone who knew Python and statistics. Perfect! Except it also wanted MySQL, Javascript, experience with the Django framework, etc. That was iffy, I hadn't even heard of half of those things!
But I bulshitted a cover letter and sent in a resume and landed an interview. It turns out the owner, a man named Colin Delia, had an incredibly similar history to mine. He was wealthy and had attended Princeton....for physics! We shared our hero-worship of Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson. He had also dabbled in teaching briefly. In the end, I was hired despite my complete lack of qualification for the position because he wanted another friend, and he believed my assertions that physicists were trained to learn quickly and adapt.
That's not to say he was wrong or I was completely talking out of my ass. I learned in a year what many go to school for four years to learn in a computer science degree. Near the end, I accidentally stumbled upon the idea of genetic algorithms in designing a way to automatically generate new symbol sequences for the virtual slot machine reels such that the payout distribution fit a desired pattern. I was thrown to the lions (or rather did everything I could to sneak into the cage myself) and survived.
But the point is that's how I got to where I am now, about to cross the threshold of a six-figure income, from seemingly-hopeless poverty and relying on a charity organization to not become homeless at one point.
Luck robbed me of advancement on my own merit and broke my spirit. But luck also brought me back and gave me a job that I should never have gotten on my own.
What are the odds that there is a programming job available within ten miles of where I was living (in an area, as I learned, where the predominant programming languages are C++, Java, and ASP/.NET)? Then what are the odds that the owner of the company advertising it also went to school for physics, and very near to NYC so we had so much in common culturally? Then what are the odds that we've read the exact same books and had been initially interested in the same sub-field? Then what are the odds that this business owner decides to take a chance and make an objectively bad decision to hire someone with no qualifications simply because we got along personally?
Don't get me wrong. As this author stresses repeatedly, hard work and uncommon skill are prerequisites to even be in the position to take advantage of such a lucky break. I worked harder in that year with Colin than I ever had in my life, and if I hadn't I would have been right back where I started. But never can I pretend that I got where I am today simply by my own hand. If that had happened, I would have taken an incredibly different career trajectory. Or, what would have happened if I had never been able to find that programming job? Where would I have ended up, since surely no other manager would have looked twice at my resume without that personal connection?
Similarly, luck continues to mess with me. I mentioned "a year" with Colin? Turns out he was just using me as a stop-gap; in the agreement to acquire the company from his partners, he had to sign a non-compete to not poach his former lead developer from them. The day that expired, I was fired and that guy came back. Then, 8 months later, the very week I ran out of money and unemployment compensation, I got a local job at GFS....once again despite having zero experience with any of the technology they used. The next day, my girlfriend gets into the PhD program here at FIT and has to move back to Melbourne....after I just got a job that locks me into Grand Rapids. Then, weeks later, the DAY I dropped a deposit check to take over the shared lease by myself, I finally got an offer for a remote programming position that allowed me to move as well.
I think because I started with everything, lost it all, and then got it all back, all through amazing twists of fate, it makes me appreciate the message of this book all the more. I'm happy to pay a larger sum in taxes today than my entire pre-tax salary as a teacher, because I was once the recipient of benefits and assistance that allowed me to claw my way back to solvency. I don't take for granted how fragile my career has been; it makes me grateful to have such a nice job, but at the same time it makes me fight harder for what I (and my coworkers) deserve. It makes me take even greater offense when "job creators" complain when asked to pay their fair share, and try to short us workers so they can have just a little bit more.
I wholeheartedly support this author's proposal for a progressive consumption tax! And I respect the rational way he laid out that premise. I think this book should be mandatory reading for everyone who loves to wax nostalgic about how hard work got them where they are today.
Hard work DID get me where I am today...but so did incredible luck, both good and bad, and my reliance on others' investment in government programs that kept my afloat through those turbulent years. I will never forget that.
To quote my favorite comedian's late wife: "It's chaos. Be kind."
June 20, 2018
The subtitle of this book might be a bit misleading. In the intro, Frank stresses that he is not saying that meritocracy is a myth (he often concedes that markets are as competitive as they've ever been) - rather, he's saying that successful people who live in meritocracies often falsely assume that their success is due wholly to their own merit. That is, they ignore the role that luck plays in their success.
Because many successful people ignore the full range of causes behind their success (many of which are outside of their control), they often feel entitled to keep 100% of their earnings. Frank thinks that if we could acknowledge the link between success and luck (like the fact that we're lucky to live in societies that offer education and public infrastructure), we would have less people spouting idiotic catchphrases like "Taxation is theft."
Frank unapologetically advocates for a progressive consumption tax (as opposed to the current progressive income tax). I am not sufficiently versed in economics to know whether this idea is the silver bullet that Frank believes it to be. However, pretty much everything he says in this book makes perfect sense, and I'm inclined to believe that if we were to adopt Frank's suggestions, we could indeed eliminate much economic waste (ie. we could "rearrange things so that some people could better achieve their goals without requiring anyone else to settle for less.").
As he points out, people who are staunchly opposed to taxation are fundamentally misguided: because we live in a world in which relative income matters (ie. your ability to buy a nice home on the beach depends purely on what other people can pay), taxing the rich does not actually reduce their ability to buy the things they want (because it's still the rich competing for that same home on the beach). Plus, what we want depends on what those around us have (so even if taxes meant that the rich could only afford Porsches rather than Ferraris, Porsches would become the new Ferraris).
Anyone who is frustrated by the rise of radical libertarianism should read Frank's books. They provide ample knowledge (and rhetorical style) with which to forcefully knock down most libertarians' claims.
Because many successful people ignore the full range of causes behind their success (many of which are outside of their control), they often feel entitled to keep 100% of their earnings. Frank thinks that if we could acknowledge the link between success and luck (like the fact that we're lucky to live in societies that offer education and public infrastructure), we would have less people spouting idiotic catchphrases like "Taxation is theft."
Frank unapologetically advocates for a progressive consumption tax (as opposed to the current progressive income tax). I am not sufficiently versed in economics to know whether this idea is the silver bullet that Frank believes it to be. However, pretty much everything he says in this book makes perfect sense, and I'm inclined to believe that if we were to adopt Frank's suggestions, we could indeed eliminate much economic waste (ie. we could "rearrange things so that some people could better achieve their goals without requiring anyone else to settle for less.").
As he points out, people who are staunchly opposed to taxation are fundamentally misguided: because we live in a world in which relative income matters (ie. your ability to buy a nice home on the beach depends purely on what other people can pay), taxing the rich does not actually reduce their ability to buy the things they want (because it's still the rich competing for that same home on the beach). Plus, what we want depends on what those around us have (so even if taxes meant that the rich could only afford Porsches rather than Ferraris, Porsches would become the new Ferraris).
Anyone who is frustrated by the rise of radical libertarianism should read Frank's books. They provide ample knowledge (and rhetorical style) with which to forcefully knock down most libertarians' claims.
February 6, 2017
This was a quick and easy read. I'm not sure how much weight anyone should put on my review as I have been drinking this Kool Aid for a few years now. The amount of evidence regarding the connection between success and luck is overwhelming. The author does a good job of walking the reader through the connections and the empirical data along with sprinkling anecdotes from his own and other's lives as well.
I think my favorite part is his metaphor using headwinds and tailwinds on a bicycle. You never notice the tailwind pushing you along (e.g., born in the USA, parents who read to you and fill your house with books, white male, etc.). But when the headwind is there, it occupies all your thoughts and efforts.
I think my favorite part is his metaphor using headwinds and tailwinds on a bicycle. You never notice the tailwind pushing you along (e.g., born in the USA, parents who read to you and fill your house with books, white male, etc.). But when the headwind is there, it occupies all your thoughts and efforts.
Read
April 1, 2018Delightful little polemic, refreshingly free of tedious moralizing. If anything the author seems so genuinely humble and grateful for the luck he's experienced in his own life that he somewhat undercuts his own argument -- because many of his confessed strokes of luck would be considered unlucky by a less mature mind! For instance, it turns out that he was given up for adoption at birth by a member of a wealthy family... and he ends up concluding that this was very lucky for him because he considers himself naturally lazy and thinks a trust fund would have sapped him of the work ethic he needed to succeed in life. Much later he credits his survival after a medical emergency to the happenstance of close ambulance location -- but most people would be forgiven for not thinking of TOTAL HEART FAILURE as any kind of good luck! He even slyly manages to turn a savage cable TV interview into an argument for his own position.
An inordinate amount of the book is spent trying to convince skeptical readers that success tracks more closely with luck than skill/hard work... or rather probably something more like, within a given tier of skill/hard work the outcomes correlate more strongly to luck than to additional skill or work. I had no idea that this view was so controversial on the political right until I read a book recently about the Koch brothers, who revere the myth of the lone entrepreneur despite the fact that they inherited vast fortunes. I personally do not find the critical importance of luck controversial, partly because I decided to read this book only after already being convinced by the 2018 Pluchino et al paper on "Talent vs Luck" which tackles the question more directly (via computer simulation) than Frank does. I believe this author is one of the originators of the theory of "winner take all markets" so he is no rookie at this topic.
A feature of the book that I specifically enjoyed was the author's attempt to speak directly to the people most affected by the luck/talent argument, the affluent (basically defined as those who have plenty for needs but still have to prioritize for wants). The practical correlate of luck is to encourage the affluent to pay more tax to fund social equalizers, especially public education. Frank's cute twist is to point out in various ways that a lot of what the upper classes want money for is conspicuous or comparative consumption... so if ALL OF US in a certain income tier took the same tax haircut for wants, we would still be good because we'd only be competing with each other. Makes perfect sense to me and I hope the idea of consumption tax gets some traction.
An inordinate amount of the book is spent trying to convince skeptical readers that success tracks more closely with luck than skill/hard work... or rather probably something more like, within a given tier of skill/hard work the outcomes correlate more strongly to luck than to additional skill or work. I had no idea that this view was so controversial on the political right until I read a book recently about the Koch brothers, who revere the myth of the lone entrepreneur despite the fact that they inherited vast fortunes. I personally do not find the critical importance of luck controversial, partly because I decided to read this book only after already being convinced by the 2018 Pluchino et al paper on "Talent vs Luck" which tackles the question more directly (via computer simulation) than Frank does. I believe this author is one of the originators of the theory of "winner take all markets" so he is no rookie at this topic.
A feature of the book that I specifically enjoyed was the author's attempt to speak directly to the people most affected by the luck/talent argument, the affluent (basically defined as those who have plenty for needs but still have to prioritize for wants). The practical correlate of luck is to encourage the affluent to pay more tax to fund social equalizers, especially public education. Frank's cute twist is to point out in various ways that a lot of what the upper classes want money for is conspicuous or comparative consumption... so if ALL OF US in a certain income tier took the same tax haircut for wants, we would still be good because we'd only be competing with each other. Makes perfect sense to me and I hope the idea of consumption tax gets some traction.
August 3, 2016
This is a compact book by Cornell economist Robert Frank that continues his push to get people to consider his major tax reform idea, but also clothes it in the broader issue of how much talent matters in people's success vs. luck.
Frank's main thesis, backed up by convincing studies, is that because there are so many talented, hard working people striving to succeed, the ones who do reach the rarefied air of the top 1 percent also have to have benefited from a great deal of luck, whether it is the country they were born in, their parents' education levels or random encounters they had on their way up the ladder. He illustrates with several examples from his own life, including his near death from a sudden heart attack and the fortunate breaks he got when he was starting out as a young professor.
(This is an attitude, I must say, that you will never see Donald Trump adopt).
Frank then goes on to show that a disproportionate number of wealthy people believe their good fortune is entirely their own doing and owes little to chance. The problem with this view, he said, is that it makes them loath to support the kind of tax investments in modern infrastructure, from highways to research to job creation, that undergird so much of their success, and that in and of itself has contributed mightily to our current economic inequality.
Frank's solution is one he has espoused for decades: replacing the progressive income tax with a progressive consumption tax. All earners would get to subtract their savings in any year from their incomes and be taxed only on their net income. But the tax rates would soar sharply above a certain high income level, which he said would have the effect of slowing down wasteful spending by the rich on luxuries, and making more money available to infrastructure investment.
Frank is a good writer, and this is his most personal elucidation of his theories. If you want a well reasoned approach on why we should be more grateful about our good fortune and how we can use that to our advantage as a nation, read this book.
Frank's main thesis, backed up by convincing studies, is that because there are so many talented, hard working people striving to succeed, the ones who do reach the rarefied air of the top 1 percent also have to have benefited from a great deal of luck, whether it is the country they were born in, their parents' education levels or random encounters they had on their way up the ladder. He illustrates with several examples from his own life, including his near death from a sudden heart attack and the fortunate breaks he got when he was starting out as a young professor.
(This is an attitude, I must say, that you will never see Donald Trump adopt).
Frank then goes on to show that a disproportionate number of wealthy people believe their good fortune is entirely their own doing and owes little to chance. The problem with this view, he said, is that it makes them loath to support the kind of tax investments in modern infrastructure, from highways to research to job creation, that undergird so much of their success, and that in and of itself has contributed mightily to our current economic inequality.
Frank's solution is one he has espoused for decades: replacing the progressive income tax with a progressive consumption tax. All earners would get to subtract their savings in any year from their incomes and be taxed only on their net income. But the tax rates would soar sharply above a certain high income level, which he said would have the effect of slowing down wasteful spending by the rich on luxuries, and making more money available to infrastructure investment.
Frank is a good writer, and this is his most personal elucidation of his theories. If you want a well reasoned approach on why we should be more grateful about our good fortune and how we can use that to our advantage as a nation, read this book.
April 14, 2016
This book has three main arguments:
(i) "chance events play a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people once imagined".
(ii)people who recognize this are more grateful and prone to accept taxes that will pay for the needed infrastructure (like education, highways, R&D) that helped them to be where they are now. This infrastructure is not for them, it is for the next generation, so they can have the same basic opportunities or tools they had. This is being grateful.
This two first point can be summarized with this quotation from the book:
“Tax resistance spawned by failure to appreciate luck’s pivotal role in success has made it harder to sustain the public investment needed to support the stock of luck available to future generations.”
(iii)The last main point the author makes is to abandon the current progressive income tax in favor of a much more steeply progressive consumption tax.
The book makes a compelling case about the important role of luck in our lives and successes/misfortunes and gives evidence that the consumption tax has already been discussed and accepted by some conservative think tanks.
(i) "chance events play a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people once imagined".
(ii)people who recognize this are more grateful and prone to accept taxes that will pay for the needed infrastructure (like education, highways, R&D) that helped them to be where they are now. This infrastructure is not for them, it is for the next generation, so they can have the same basic opportunities or tools they had. This is being grateful.
This two first point can be summarized with this quotation from the book:
“Tax resistance spawned by failure to appreciate luck’s pivotal role in success has made it harder to sustain the public investment needed to support the stock of luck available to future generations.”
(iii)The last main point the author makes is to abandon the current progressive income tax in favor of a much more steeply progressive consumption tax.
The book makes a compelling case about the important role of luck in our lives and successes/misfortunes and gives evidence that the consumption tax has already been discussed and accepted by some conservative think tanks.
July 21, 2017
This book CLEARLY and DIRECTLY addresses the greatest problems of our time, the rapidly increasing political and economic inequities even in our most advanced societies.
FIVE stars! -- Certainly RECOMMENDED!
"Historically, two of the most worrisome practical consequences of increased inequality of wealth have been the creation of family dynasties and increased concentration of political power among the wealthy."
--Robert H. Frank, 2016.
"Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy," p.166.
FIVE stars! -- Certainly RECOMMENDED!
"Historically, two of the most worrisome practical consequences of increased inequality of wealth have been the creation of family dynasties and increased concentration of political power among the wealthy."
--Robert H. Frank, 2016.
"Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy," p.166.
no
July 31, 2019Sprinting records happen when there's a tailwind.
Luck plays a huge role in wealth or poverty.
Advocates a consumption tax. Bad plan. Tax wealth. Luxury tax on private jets and yachts cripples the industries, knocking out some of the few ways misers part with money. Tax wealth. Problem isn't somebody driving too nice a car, it's hoarding wealth, bidding up asset-market bubbles that bust us all. And using wealth to influence policy. Tax wealth.
Luck plays a huge role in wealth or poverty.
Advocates a consumption tax. Bad plan. Tax wealth. Luxury tax on private jets and yachts cripples the industries, knocking out some of the few ways misers part with money. Tax wealth. Problem isn't somebody driving too nice a car, it's hoarding wealth, bidding up asset-market bubbles that bust us all. And using wealth to influence policy. Tax wealth.
May 15, 2016
I bought this book because I am interested by the fact that people feel deserving of the rewards of their work; yet in a deep way, we don't influence our talents or even our propensity for hard work. That is, we are have certain natural endowments (say genes) that are cultivated, or not, by our parents and early childhood experiences.
I was disappointed that Frank's book only addresses the philosophical underpinnings of success and luck in a tangential way. He doesn't get into the really deep stuff.
It's a very short book, and he says early on that he resisted his publishers attempts to cover more ground. The publishers had a point, I think, because Frank only conveys one basic idea throughout his book and that could have been distilled into a short article.
Basically, Frank's point is that just as bull elk have massive, unwieldy antlers that are wasteful for all in their evolutionary efforts to 'keep up'; we humans splurge on mansions, automobiles and weddings in a similar effort to keep up with the norms of our social circles.
All this waste would stop (or be reduced) if only we would adopt a progressive consumption tax (basically a tax on spending that takes a bigger bite the more that you spend). This, says Frank, would discourage spending among the wealthy, increase savings, and thereby lower interest rates, motivate investment by firms, and therefore increase productivity and our standard of living.
Even the short description above I had to mostly glean from Frank's Appendix II, as for some unknown reason, he chooses not to get into any details of his tax solution within the actual body of the book.
Instead, Frank devotes his pages to describing the results of silly (sorry - just my opinion) behavioral experiments whose results are obvious or at least not insightful. He finds, for example, that people are more interested in befriending and attributing kindness to a CEO who acknowledges the role of luck compared one who takes personal credit for his success.
There are a few good nuggets/lessons within the book that I enjoyed:
- Even if luck is a small factor in our lives, it if often the decisive factor in competitive arenas where the skill level of many participants is going to be very close
- We are more attractive as a team member and leader if we cultivate an attitude of humility; indeed, we will be more effective if we attribute ideas and success widely (i.e. higher levels of engagement and ownership of the team)
- The 'terms of reference' that you apply to your lives really matter in terms of making you an unwitting participant in the sort of wasteful, positional spending that many of us get caught up in
I was disappointed that Frank's book only addresses the philosophical underpinnings of success and luck in a tangential way. He doesn't get into the really deep stuff.
It's a very short book, and he says early on that he resisted his publishers attempts to cover more ground. The publishers had a point, I think, because Frank only conveys one basic idea throughout his book and that could have been distilled into a short article.
Basically, Frank's point is that just as bull elk have massive, unwieldy antlers that are wasteful for all in their evolutionary efforts to 'keep up'; we humans splurge on mansions, automobiles and weddings in a similar effort to keep up with the norms of our social circles.
All this waste would stop (or be reduced) if only we would adopt a progressive consumption tax (basically a tax on spending that takes a bigger bite the more that you spend). This, says Frank, would discourage spending among the wealthy, increase savings, and thereby lower interest rates, motivate investment by firms, and therefore increase productivity and our standard of living.
Even the short description above I had to mostly glean from Frank's Appendix II, as for some unknown reason, he chooses not to get into any details of his tax solution within the actual body of the book.
Instead, Frank devotes his pages to describing the results of silly (sorry - just my opinion) behavioral experiments whose results are obvious or at least not insightful. He finds, for example, that people are more interested in befriending and attributing kindness to a CEO who acknowledges the role of luck compared one who takes personal credit for his success.
There are a few good nuggets/lessons within the book that I enjoyed:
- Even if luck is a small factor in our lives, it if often the decisive factor in competitive arenas where the skill level of many participants is going to be very close
- We are more attractive as a team member and leader if we cultivate an attitude of humility; indeed, we will be more effective if we attribute ideas and success widely (i.e. higher levels of engagement and ownership of the team)
- The 'terms of reference' that you apply to your lives really matter in terms of making you an unwitting participant in the sort of wasteful, positional spending that many of us get caught up in
June 22, 2016
A vitally important observation, that leaders need to understand, but should have been a much better book.
Let's face it, our society is built on the myth of Meritocracy - that the winners got there because they are the "best" and through their own industry and hard work "deserve" their success. The reality is that while in success and work and talent are somewhat correlated in the aggregate - the relationship is looser in the specific. e.g. Two talented lab assistants in the same research lab are assigned to projects. One ends up on the team that discovers something spectacular and is projected on a path to wealth and influence. The other is on a project that goes nowhere, and ends up a struggling adjunct. It is important that talented people work on research, but we delude ourselves to think that the "best" always or even often win. In a society where the rewards are skewed to the winners this has big implications. For more .... Read the book
Couple of criticism. First, Mr. Frank spends too much time on his personal story - which is a good example of how we are all impacted by chance. Second, I would have liked to see him focus more on why we refuse to recognize the importance of luck. He ignores the whole Weberian/"Protestant Work Ethic"/Divine Election aspect of the topic - and that is a real loss. I found the omission odd, from an economist. But anyway, still a worthwhile read.
Let's face it, our society is built on the myth of Meritocracy - that the winners got there because they are the "best" and through their own industry and hard work "deserve" their success. The reality is that while in success and work and talent are somewhat correlated in the aggregate - the relationship is looser in the specific. e.g. Two talented lab assistants in the same research lab are assigned to projects. One ends up on the team that discovers something spectacular and is projected on a path to wealth and influence. The other is on a project that goes nowhere, and ends up a struggling adjunct. It is important that talented people work on research, but we delude ourselves to think that the "best" always or even often win. In a society where the rewards are skewed to the winners this has big implications. For more .... Read the book
Couple of criticism. First, Mr. Frank spends too much time on his personal story - which is a good example of how we are all impacted by chance. Second, I would have liked to see him focus more on why we refuse to recognize the importance of luck. He ignores the whole Weberian/"Protestant Work Ethic"/Divine Election aspect of the topic - and that is a real loss. I found the omission odd, from an economist. But anyway, still a worthwhile read.
December 6, 2019
In India, according to Sachar Committee Report, Muslims constitute 14% of the Indian population, but they only comprise 2.5% of the Indian bureaucracy. This point is often quoted by some Muslims as a proof that Muslims are being suppressed. But they conveniently miss another important statistic found by the committee: "Only 4.5% of 20-30 year old Muslims are graduates. (2.8% for 40-50 year olds.) The reason that Muslims are lagging behind comes mainly from within their society - aversion to education.
https://scroll.in/article/812272/musl...
https://theconversation.com/what-are-...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...
Some of the parents send their kids to madrasas. (4% Muslim students attend Madrasas full-time.) And most of the madrasas teach outdated syllabus(17th/18th century syllabus). "The Quran, Urdu and Persian remain main subjects, limiting the job prospects. They are churning out vast numbers of maulvis, only some of whom can be absorbed into the system. Others turn into a burden on Muslim society because they have not been trained in such a way as to be an asset to the community."
And "religious leaders who could approve changes are 'set against the modern education.'” And very few Muslim parents send girls to school.
When my grandfather enrolled my mother in a public school (even her brothers are enrolled in the public school), members from the masjid he attends to, opposed it. And in India, there is a trade-off between spending money on educating a girl or spending it on a dowry; education often means a smaller dowry or none at all.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/201...
According to a University of Michigan study, "A mother knows best—and the amount of education she attains can predict her children’s success in reading and math. In fact, that success is greater if she had her child later in life."
https://news.umich.edu/mothers-educat...
I got my graduation and post graduation from elite Universities in India. I certainly take credit for it. There are very few students from Muslim background in elite Universities. Some don't even have 1% students from Muslim community. How did I make into that 1% - hard work, and because I'm lucky too. I'm born to an educated mother, not that my father had no role in it. Having an educated mother boosted my luck. Having an awesome school in our town. Having good public schools which are very affordable , where my parents got educated. And because leaders during early independent India established very modern Universities.
What does it take to succeed? What are the secrets of the most successful people? Talent, skill, hard work, optimism, growth mindset etc.
But is this assumption correct? In recent years, a number of studies and books have suggested that luck and opportunity may play a far greater role than we ever realized. This book is one of them. The argument is not that luck is everything; of course talent matters. Instead, that we miss out on a really importance piece of the success if we only focus on personal traits.
Michael Lewis at Princeton's Baccalaureate described an experiment conducted by psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley. The researchers sent volunteer subjects into small rooms in same-sex groups of three and gave them a complex moral problem to resolve, such as what to do about an episode of cheating on an exam. Arbitrarily, they assigned one member of each group as its leader. Thirty minutes into each team’s deliberations, a researcher entered the room with a plate bearing four cookies for the three volunteers.
Who ate the extra cookie? In each case, it was the leader of the group, even though, as Lewis notes, “He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/micha...
Warren Buffett once said, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
Echoing Buffett’s thought, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reminded audiences during her 2012 campaign that "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. You built a factory out there, good for you…. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police and firefighters that the rest of us paid for…. You built a factory and it turned into a great idea, God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is that you take part of that and pay it forward for the next kid who comes along."
The YouTube video of her remarks that day quickly went viral, with many commentators bitterly denouncing her failure to recognize that most successful entrepreneurs had made it essentially on their own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2u...
On reflection, however, it’s difficult to dispute Senator Warren’s claim that being born in a good environment is an enormous stroke of good fortune. More important, it is the one form of good luck over which societies have any significant degree of control.
But that control requires high levels of investment, which many societies have lately been reluctant to support.
Everyone agrees that cars would be of little use without roads and that roads would be of little use without cars. Consider this thought experiment: Which experience would a wealthy car enthusiast prefer: driving a Porsche 911 Turbo (purchase price, $150,000) on smooth, well-maintained highways, or driving a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta (purchase price, $333,000) on roads riddled with foot-deep potholes?
It’s an easy question. How, then, could anyone argue with a straight face that it would be more pleasing to drive the Ferrari on pothole-ridden roads than to drive the Porsche on well-maintained ones?
Raghuram Rajan, India's former RBI governor coined a new term to describe corruption in India: the “Resource Raj,” rather than the License Raj, meaning a Russian-style system in which politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists colluded to carve up access to valuable natural resources and shared the proceeds among themselves.
According to one of Samuel Huntington theories, corruption and growth could go hand in hand. “In the south India, you can say that politicians learned to steal, but to do it while expanding the cake at the same time,” as Devesh Kapur, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, once put. “In north India they just went about taking as much of the cake for themselves as they could, and soon there wasn’t any cake left for anyone else.”
One civil servant who worked with various governments in southern India explained, rather than going for the very lowest bidder, or the one who was likely to extort the most money, wise politicians like Jayalalithaa and YSR (South Indian politicians) tended to avoid outright cowboy contractors. Instead, they favored those companies who were both willing to play the game and competent in delivering projects, meaning that they would make a decent fist of building the irrigation schemes and airport terminals in question, while also being generous with their profits. “They [the better contractors] will charge you 140 rupees for work which should have cost 100 rupees, but they will actually spend 100 rupees and do a good job,” the civil servant said. “You have others who will quote 105, and will spend 80 of it, and do a substandard job, which will fall apart three years from now, so them you want to avoid.”
The point is not that corruption can go hand in hand with development but that there needs to be a pie in the first place, in order to take bite out of it. Even if morality is kept aside, there are some good reasons, even if we are thinking selfishly, that will benefit us if we invest back in the community. How can the pie grow without the rich paying the taxes? From where can the religious leaders get their donations from if they stop educating the kids? How can the next generation of kids have a successful life without the education of girls?
This book doesn't touch all aspects of society, but it did drive one's point home: there is some significant aspect of luck in our success. It shows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies.
Michael Lewis concluded his Princeton address by saying, "there are of course many people who are quick to acknowledge good fortune’s contribution to their success. Those people, it turns out, are much more likely than others to support the kinds of public investments that created and maintained the environments that made their own success possible. They’re also substantially happier than others. And the very fact of their gratitude itself appears to steer additional material prosperity their way."
https://scroll.in/article/812272/musl...
https://theconversation.com/what-are-...
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...
Some of the parents send their kids to madrasas. (4% Muslim students attend Madrasas full-time.) And most of the madrasas teach outdated syllabus(17th/18th century syllabus). "The Quran, Urdu and Persian remain main subjects, limiting the job prospects. They are churning out vast numbers of maulvis, only some of whom can be absorbed into the system. Others turn into a burden on Muslim society because they have not been trained in such a way as to be an asset to the community."
And "religious leaders who could approve changes are 'set against the modern education.'” And very few Muslim parents send girls to school.
When my grandfather enrolled my mother in a public school (even her brothers are enrolled in the public school), members from the masjid he attends to, opposed it. And in India, there is a trade-off between spending money on educating a girl or spending it on a dowry; education often means a smaller dowry or none at all.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/201...
According to a University of Michigan study, "A mother knows best—and the amount of education she attains can predict her children’s success in reading and math. In fact, that success is greater if she had her child later in life."
https://news.umich.edu/mothers-educat...
I got my graduation and post graduation from elite Universities in India. I certainly take credit for it. There are very few students from Muslim background in elite Universities. Some don't even have 1% students from Muslim community. How did I make into that 1% - hard work, and because I'm lucky too. I'm born to an educated mother, not that my father had no role in it. Having an educated mother boosted my luck. Having an awesome school in our town. Having good public schools which are very affordable , where my parents got educated. And because leaders during early independent India established very modern Universities.
What does it take to succeed? What are the secrets of the most successful people? Talent, skill, hard work, optimism, growth mindset etc.
But is this assumption correct? In recent years, a number of studies and books have suggested that luck and opportunity may play a far greater role than we ever realized. This book is one of them. The argument is not that luck is everything; of course talent matters. Instead, that we miss out on a really importance piece of the success if we only focus on personal traits.
Michael Lewis at Princeton's Baccalaureate described an experiment conducted by psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley. The researchers sent volunteer subjects into small rooms in same-sex groups of three and gave them a complex moral problem to resolve, such as what to do about an episode of cheating on an exam. Arbitrarily, they assigned one member of each group as its leader. Thirty minutes into each team’s deliberations, a researcher entered the room with a plate bearing four cookies for the three volunteers.
Who ate the extra cookie? In each case, it was the leader of the group, even though, as Lewis notes, “He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/micha...
Warren Buffett once said, “Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
Echoing Buffett’s thought, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren reminded audiences during her 2012 campaign that "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. You built a factory out there, good for you…. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police and firefighters that the rest of us paid for…. You built a factory and it turned into a great idea, God bless—keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is that you take part of that and pay it forward for the next kid who comes along."
The YouTube video of her remarks that day quickly went viral, with many commentators bitterly denouncing her failure to recognize that most successful entrepreneurs had made it essentially on their own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2u...
On reflection, however, it’s difficult to dispute Senator Warren’s claim that being born in a good environment is an enormous stroke of good fortune. More important, it is the one form of good luck over which societies have any significant degree of control.
But that control requires high levels of investment, which many societies have lately been reluctant to support.
Everyone agrees that cars would be of little use without roads and that roads would be of little use without cars. Consider this thought experiment: Which experience would a wealthy car enthusiast prefer: driving a Porsche 911 Turbo (purchase price, $150,000) on smooth, well-maintained highways, or driving a Ferrari F12 Berlinetta (purchase price, $333,000) on roads riddled with foot-deep potholes?
It’s an easy question. How, then, could anyone argue with a straight face that it would be more pleasing to drive the Ferrari on pothole-ridden roads than to drive the Porsche on well-maintained ones?
Raghuram Rajan, India's former RBI governor coined a new term to describe corruption in India: the “Resource Raj,” rather than the License Raj, meaning a Russian-style system in which politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists colluded to carve up access to valuable natural resources and shared the proceeds among themselves.
According to one of Samuel Huntington theories, corruption and growth could go hand in hand. “In the south India, you can say that politicians learned to steal, but to do it while expanding the cake at the same time,” as Devesh Kapur, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, once put. “In north India they just went about taking as much of the cake for themselves as they could, and soon there wasn’t any cake left for anyone else.”
One civil servant who worked with various governments in southern India explained, rather than going for the very lowest bidder, or the one who was likely to extort the most money, wise politicians like Jayalalithaa and YSR (South Indian politicians) tended to avoid outright cowboy contractors. Instead, they favored those companies who were both willing to play the game and competent in delivering projects, meaning that they would make a decent fist of building the irrigation schemes and airport terminals in question, while also being generous with their profits. “They [the better contractors] will charge you 140 rupees for work which should have cost 100 rupees, but they will actually spend 100 rupees and do a good job,” the civil servant said. “You have others who will quote 105, and will spend 80 of it, and do a substandard job, which will fall apart three years from now, so them you want to avoid.”
The point is not that corruption can go hand in hand with development but that there needs to be a pie in the first place, in order to take bite out of it. Even if morality is kept aside, there are some good reasons, even if we are thinking selfishly, that will benefit us if we invest back in the community. How can the pie grow without the rich paying the taxes? From where can the religious leaders get their donations from if they stop educating the kids? How can the next generation of kids have a successful life without the education of girls?
This book doesn't touch all aspects of society, but it did drive one's point home: there is some significant aspect of luck in our success. It shows how a more accurate understanding of the role of chance in life could lead to better, richer, and fairer economies and societies.
Michael Lewis concluded his Princeton address by saying, "there are of course many people who are quick to acknowledge good fortune’s contribution to their success. Those people, it turns out, are much more likely than others to support the kinds of public investments that created and maintained the environments that made their own success possible. They’re also substantially happier than others. And the very fact of their gratitude itself appears to steer additional material prosperity their way."
June 2, 2019
I am rating this book primarily on how I think I would feel about it, had I read the description properly and not read so many other books with the same sort of information. It's a good book - well written, logical, straight to the point, pragmatic, short and to the point. The author's main messages are clear, simple, and easy to implement.
All that said, within this genre, it's not particularly original, and it's really only tangentially related to the notion of meritocracy. It really is a book much like all the others written by economists and behavioural economists, that points out how we overestimate our own abilities and underplay the role of luck, how heuristics work most of the time but sometimes fail us, how our biases affect the narratives we tell ourselves about our own lives, others, and society, etc. I pre-ordered this book when I first saw it was going to be published because I haven't read a book specifically dedicated to the ludicrous notion of meritocracy, and I was interested in learning more about why people hold on to this idea despite it being such an obvious myth. This book is not about that, really; or rather perhaps it is more accurate to say that it focuses on mainly one aspect of the possible "why", relating mainly to some of the aforementioned cognitive errors that humans tend to make. I would still like to read a book that discusses meritocracy from a more macro-scale perspective, however, as the book doesn't really explain why the notion of meritocracy is so much more pervasive in societies like the United States but not so in countries that aren't really all that culturally different. What might the X factor be? That would be an interesting book for sure.
That said, if you haven't read books such as Invisible Gorilla, The Drunkards Walk, Predictably Irrational, Thinking, Fast and Slow or other pop psychology and behavioural economics books, you will get a lot out of this book, I think, and it's a quick and entertaining read. It would be thought provoking if you haven't been exposed to some of these concepts before, and it is more economically-oriented than the others I mentioned. It also has a very simple policy proposal that makes quite a lot of sense to restructure society in a way that might make it more equal, but I will leave that to readers to discover themselves.
All that said, within this genre, it's not particularly original, and it's really only tangentially related to the notion of meritocracy. It really is a book much like all the others written by economists and behavioural economists, that points out how we overestimate our own abilities and underplay the role of luck, how heuristics work most of the time but sometimes fail us, how our biases affect the narratives we tell ourselves about our own lives, others, and society, etc. I pre-ordered this book when I first saw it was going to be published because I haven't read a book specifically dedicated to the ludicrous notion of meritocracy, and I was interested in learning more about why people hold on to this idea despite it being such an obvious myth. This book is not about that, really; or rather perhaps it is more accurate to say that it focuses on mainly one aspect of the possible "why", relating mainly to some of the aforementioned cognitive errors that humans tend to make. I would still like to read a book that discusses meritocracy from a more macro-scale perspective, however, as the book doesn't really explain why the notion of meritocracy is so much more pervasive in societies like the United States but not so in countries that aren't really all that culturally different. What might the X factor be? That would be an interesting book for sure.
That said, if you haven't read books such as Invisible Gorilla, The Drunkards Walk, Predictably Irrational, Thinking, Fast and Slow or other pop psychology and behavioural economics books, you will get a lot out of this book, I think, and it's a quick and entertaining read. It would be thought provoking if you haven't been exposed to some of these concepts before, and it is more economically-oriented than the others I mentioned. It also has a very simple policy proposal that makes quite a lot of sense to restructure society in a way that might make it more equal, but I will leave that to readers to discover themselves.
November 25, 2025
خلاصهی خلاصهی کتاب شانس و موفقیت:
کتاب درمورد چیه؟ کتاب درباره اینه که موفقيت افراد و شرکتها لزوما یه خاطر استعداد و تلاش صرف آدمها نیست بلکه شانس هم در موفقیت ما و دیگران نقش داره.
نقش شانس در موفقیتهای اقتصادی پررنگه: نویسنده با مثالی از خودش شروع میکنه. سال ۲۰۰۷ حین بازی تنیس دچار حمله قلبی میشه. در حالت عادی چندین دقیقه زمان میبرد تا آمبولانس بخواد برسه پس مرگش قریبالوقوع بود. اما آمبولانس یه خیابون اونورتر بود و به موقع رسید و نویسنده نجات پیدا کرد.
تصور ما اینه که اگر کسی به ثروت زیادی رسید، یعنی لایق این جایگاه بوده چون هوش بالایی داشته و تلاش زیادی کرده و اگر کسی نتونست به ثروت برسه یا ثروتش رو از دست داد به خاطر بی کفایتی خودش بوده. اما مسئله اینجاست که داریم شانس رو نادیده میگیریم. به طور مثال امکانات و فرصتهایی که در اختیار فرد متولد شده در آمریکا هست با فردی در خاورمیانه زندگی میکنه یکسان نیست. یا دسترسی به امکانات برای کسی که در خانواده پولدارتری به دنيا میاد از کسی که در خانواده فقیرتری به دنیا میاد بیشتره پس فرصتهای بیشتری جلوی روشه.
یه شغل عالی هم میتونه با کمک شانس میسر بشه: حتی درمورد بیل گیتس هم شانس کمکدهنده بوده. اون در دهه ۱۹۶۰ به مدرسه Lakeside prep میره که اولین نسل ترمینالهای کامپیوتری اونجا وجود داشتن و میتونه برنامهنویسی رو در همون سالهای ابتدایی رونمایی از کامپیوترها یاد بگیره.
داشتن جامعه خوششانس: برای اینکه جامعه از افراد خوششانس پر بشه، باید منافع خوششانسی توسط دولت پخش و حمایت بشه. دولتها روی فعالیتهایی که مالیات کمی از اونها به دست میاد سرمایه نمیذارن مخصوصا بعد از تجربه دولت بوش که ضرر ۲.۹ تریلیون دلاری به ارمغان آورد. اونا ترجیح میدن روی فعالیتهایی با مالیات خوب تمرکز کنن که رفاه رو از دسترس سایر اقشار جامعه دور میکنه و مثلا جادهها یا مدارس بینصیب میمونن. باید مالیات رو از ثروتمندان بیشتر گرفت که خب با مخالفت مواجه هست.
راهحل برای مشکل مالیات: باید مالیات بر مصرف دریافت کرد. براساس میزان مصرف، نرخ مالیات مشخص میشه و افراد ثروتمند با توجه به مصرف بیشترشون، مشمول مالیات بیشتر میشن. درنتیجه یه مزیت خوب هم به دنبالش میاد و اون اینه که مردم به سمت پسانداز و سرمایهگذاری میرن تا با ایجاد هزینه و مصرف پولشون مشمول مالیات بیشتر نشن. از طرفی بیشتر مالیات مورد نیاز از محل مالیات اخذشده از ثروتمندان تامین میشه.
پ.ن: خلاصهای از خلاصه متنی و صوتی کتاب تهیه شده توسط برنامه چکیدا ♡
کتاب درمورد چیه؟ کتاب درباره اینه که موفقيت افراد و شرکتها لزوما یه خاطر استعداد و تلاش صرف آدمها نیست بلکه شانس هم در موفقیت ما و دیگران نقش داره.
نقش شانس در موفقیتهای اقتصادی پررنگه: نویسنده با مثالی از خودش شروع میکنه. سال ۲۰۰۷ حین بازی تنیس دچار حمله قلبی میشه. در حالت عادی چندین دقیقه زمان میبرد تا آمبولانس بخواد برسه پس مرگش قریبالوقوع بود. اما آمبولانس یه خیابون اونورتر بود و به موقع رسید و نویسنده نجات پیدا کرد.
تصور ما اینه که اگر کسی به ثروت زیادی رسید، یعنی لایق این جایگاه بوده چون هوش بالایی داشته و تلاش زیادی کرده و اگر کسی نتونست به ثروت برسه یا ثروتش رو از دست داد به خاطر بی کفایتی خودش بوده. اما مسئله اینجاست که داریم شانس رو نادیده میگیریم. به طور مثال امکانات و فرصتهایی که در اختیار فرد متولد شده در آمریکا هست با فردی در خاورمیانه زندگی میکنه یکسان نیست. یا دسترسی به امکانات برای کسی که در خانواده پولدارتری به دنيا میاد از کسی که در خانواده فقیرتری به دنیا میاد بیشتره پس فرصتهای بیشتری جلوی روشه.
یه شغل عالی هم میتونه با کمک شانس میسر بشه: حتی درمورد بیل گیتس هم شانس کمکدهنده بوده. اون در دهه ۱۹۶۰ به مدرسه Lakeside prep میره که اولین نسل ترمینالهای کامپیوتری اونجا وجود داشتن و میتونه برنامهنویسی رو در همون سالهای ابتدایی رونمایی از کامپیوترها یاد بگیره.
داشتن جامعه خوششانس: برای اینکه جامعه از افراد خوششانس پر بشه، باید منافع خوششانسی توسط دولت پخش و حمایت بشه. دولتها روی فعالیتهایی که مالیات کمی از اونها به دست میاد سرمایه نمیذارن مخصوصا بعد از تجربه دولت بوش که ضرر ۲.۹ تریلیون دلاری به ارمغان آورد. اونا ترجیح میدن روی فعالیتهایی با مالیات خوب تمرکز کنن که رفاه رو از دسترس سایر اقشار جامعه دور میکنه و مثلا جادهها یا مدارس بینصیب میمونن. باید مالیات رو از ثروتمندان بیشتر گرفت که خب با مخالفت مواجه هست.
راهحل برای مشکل مالیات: باید مالیات بر مصرف دریافت کرد. براساس میزان مصرف، نرخ مالیات مشخص میشه و افراد ثروتمند با توجه به مصرف بیشترشون، مشمول مالیات بیشتر میشن. درنتیجه یه مزیت خوب هم به دنبالش میاد و اون اینه که مردم به سمت پسانداز و سرمایهگذاری میرن تا با ایجاد هزینه و مصرف پولشون مشمول مالیات بیشتر نشن. از طرفی بیشتر مالیات مورد نیاز از محل مالیات اخذشده از ثروتمندان تامین میشه.
پ.ن: خلاصهای از خلاصه متنی و صوتی کتاب تهیه شده توسط برنامه چکیدا ♡
February 14, 2020
This is a concise book on the role luck plays throughout life, particularly with regards to career success. This concept is really important to understand in an era of diverging economic classes, the wealth gap, calls for social reform, divisive political tension, and so on. Ask yourself, do you think you deserve the success you have achieved because you have worked hard in life, got a good education, and worked your way up through the ranks? No doubt that explains at least a part of your success. However, in all likelihood you are fooling yourself if you don't also consider pure dumb luck to have played a significant role. With luck contributing to your success, does that affect how you view others that have not achieved the success you have achieved? Does that affect your feelings on how much you "merit" what you have or where you have gotten to in life? It is probable that there are others more qualified than you that did not get the same breaks you did somewhere along the way, and are in much worse positions in life than you are because of it. Should they merit less just because luck was on your side? These are the kinds of questions this book seeks to ask and address, and many others. Well worth the short read for those that have strong meritocracy opinions, or think that hard work and education levels the playing field for everyone. It's also just pleasantly thought provoking.
Frank goes on to add some political implications if everyone were to shift away from a more meritocracy paradigm to a more true to life view. In particular, he discusses how one might view the tax code differently in such a world. I rather liked that he went into this, but I know some reviewers did not. It helped round out the ideas he was trying to present, but the majority of the book was just good reading to help me think about life a little more realistically. It was a bit humbling, which I need.
Frank goes on to add some political implications if everyone were to shift away from a more meritocracy paradigm to a more true to life view. In particular, he discusses how one might view the tax code differently in such a world. I rather liked that he went into this, but I know some reviewers did not. It helped round out the ideas he was trying to present, but the majority of the book was just good reading to help me think about life a little more realistically. It was a bit humbling, which I need.
December 31, 2022
I threw out my back a month ago and consequently spent the month of December both missing work and paying out of pocket for various physical therapists and a non-quack, non-spine adjustment chiropractor that's really more of a massage therapist, neither of which are covered by my insurance. I was just sitting here calculating the financial cost of this malady and if you add up the lost income plus the healthcare expenditures, I'm probably down two grand from where I otherwise would be over the month.
This is an example of the way luck impacts fortune.
The main message here is that people tend to underestimate the role that luck plays in their success, and I've encountered this idea before but it was nice to have it convincingly and eloquently spelled out in a short book. There was also a lot of stuff about tax policy which seems reasonable but honestly was a bit of a wade.
It's cool that the author's sons are in an indie rock band. I'm a veteran of the indie rock band tour circuit and the central complaint of my life is that the music industry sucks relative to the '90s, and the reason is the internet but the real reason is money and people need to spend $ on bands, that is my rant.
The Music Lab findings suggest that many songs (or books or movies) that go on to become hits owe much of their success to the fact that the first people to review them just happened to like them.
This is an example of the way luck impacts fortune.
The main message here is that people tend to underestimate the role that luck plays in their success, and I've encountered this idea before but it was nice to have it convincingly and eloquently spelled out in a short book. There was also a lot of stuff about tax policy which seems reasonable but honestly was a bit of a wade.
It's cool that the author's sons are in an indie rock band. I'm a veteran of the indie rock band tour circuit and the central complaint of my life is that the music industry sucks relative to the '90s, and the reason is the internet but the real reason is money and people need to spend $ on bands, that is my rant.
The Music Lab findings suggest that many songs (or books or movies) that go on to become hits owe much of their success to the fact that the first people to review them just happened to like them.
May 25, 2021
In het kort: iedereen die risico heeft genomen, en (geweldig) geslaagd is, heeft het dus niet enkel aan zichzelf te denken, maar ook aan een portie geluk. (Naast hard werken, kennis, enz.)
Dat maar dan geweldig onderbouwd, met veel voorbeelden en studies.
Een deel van dat 'geluk' zit ook in infrastructuur zoals scholen, wegen en gezondheidszorg... dus progressieve belasting is het eerlijkst, en dat treft de superrijken niet (of toch niet teveel). Als je dat een indrukwekkende bocht vindt (want dat is het): de auteur legt het we goed uit. (En je weet meteen waarom republikeinen hem liefst met pek en veren buiten dragen). Hoe goed onderbouwd die tweede stelling ook mag zijn, ik betwijfel of hij er veel zieltjes mee gat winnen - maar toch de moeite om te lezen.
Dat maar dan geweldig onderbouwd, met veel voorbeelden en studies.
Een deel van dat 'geluk' zit ook in infrastructuur zoals scholen, wegen en gezondheidszorg... dus progressieve belasting is het eerlijkst, en dat treft de superrijken niet (of toch niet teveel). Als je dat een indrukwekkende bocht vindt (want dat is het): de auteur legt het we goed uit. (En je weet meteen waarom republikeinen hem liefst met pek en veren buiten dragen). Hoe goed onderbouwd die tweede stelling ook mag zijn, ik betwijfel of hij er veel zieltjes mee gat winnen - maar toch de moeite om te lezen.
September 28, 2022
Interesting analysis and I agree with most of the points, but I am not a fan of the fact that around half the book is composed of personal stories and anecdotes. The other half which is actual economic and statistical analysis is solid. Would have been nice if he had spent more time on the normative aspect of his results, i.e., more policy proposals, instead of the only one he discusses at length, a progressive consumption tax.
July 17, 2021
Clever, small and ingenious book on the role of luck in life
This books sets itself to persuade the reader to consider that many life outcomes are, in fact, produced not only by effort, skill and talent, but also by luck. In particular by the luck of having being born the right set of circumstances. It anticipates many of the simple criticisms by stating that, although talent, effort and skill are necessary conditions, they are not sufficient. And that forces us to rethink the role we give in social and personal narratives to circumstances and luck.
This books sets itself to persuade the reader to consider that many life outcomes are, in fact, produced not only by effort, skill and talent, but also by luck. In particular by the luck of having being born the right set of circumstances. It anticipates many of the simple criticisms by stating that, although talent, effort and skill are necessary conditions, they are not sufficient. And that forces us to rethink the role we give in social and personal narratives to circumstances and luck.
September 6, 2023
those complaining this veers into tax policy have missed the entire point of the book
October 31, 2023
2nd read:
This is easily a must-read book. I was totally unfamiliar with Sally Kohn’s work, but she has a great head on her shoulders. In short, Sally wanted to understand why we hate other groups of people, and it mainly started with online trolls and political polarization. Although I knew a lot of what she talks about in this book, it was great reading about her going on this journey, and I did learn about a few studies I hadn’t heard of before.
This book stretches far beyond polarization and touches on genocides and other atrocities. Sally interviews online trolls and gets interesting answers as to why they attack her. She also dives into racial biases, and although I’ve read about this topic extensively, I have never seen a white person become so introspective about the topic. It wasn’t the “I’m a terrible white person”, stuff either. She catches her thoughts and lays them out there, and if more people did that, this world would be a much better place.
1st read:
There are a handful of books that I’ve read where I think, “Literally everyone needs to read this book to better understand life and the world,” and this book from Robert Frank is one of them. I read this book for the first time about a year ago and decided to read it again because Robert is coming on my podcast, and I binged it in about a day. This was one of the first books that I read that really broke down the myth of meritocracy and how luck plays a role in success, and the second time reading it, I gained even more from the experience. This time, I was able to better understand some of Robert’s suggestions and quotes from others about how we balance success and luck while also making this world a little bit better for everyone.
By reading this book, you have an understanding of why hard work and developing skills are both important, but you only have so much control over your outcomes. This allows us to be humble and grateful for our successes while also pushing forward. Many of the lessons from this book are ones I teach my son so he practices gratitude and humility while also having a strong work ethic. But why do so many people neglect to credit luck in their success? Frank points to some evolutionary theories that may explain why these are adaptive behaviors, but although adaptive, it doesn’t mean we can’t work on it.
This is easily a must-read book. I was totally unfamiliar with Sally Kohn’s work, but she has a great head on her shoulders. In short, Sally wanted to understand why we hate other groups of people, and it mainly started with online trolls and political polarization. Although I knew a lot of what she talks about in this book, it was great reading about her going on this journey, and I did learn about a few studies I hadn’t heard of before.
This book stretches far beyond polarization and touches on genocides and other atrocities. Sally interviews online trolls and gets interesting answers as to why they attack her. She also dives into racial biases, and although I’ve read about this topic extensively, I have never seen a white person become so introspective about the topic. It wasn’t the “I’m a terrible white person”, stuff either. She catches her thoughts and lays them out there, and if more people did that, this world would be a much better place.
1st read:
There are a handful of books that I’ve read where I think, “Literally everyone needs to read this book to better understand life and the world,” and this book from Robert Frank is one of them. I read this book for the first time about a year ago and decided to read it again because Robert is coming on my podcast, and I binged it in about a day. This was one of the first books that I read that really broke down the myth of meritocracy and how luck plays a role in success, and the second time reading it, I gained even more from the experience. This time, I was able to better understand some of Robert’s suggestions and quotes from others about how we balance success and luck while also making this world a little bit better for everyone.
By reading this book, you have an understanding of why hard work and developing skills are both important, but you only have so much control over your outcomes. This allows us to be humble and grateful for our successes while also pushing forward. Many of the lessons from this book are ones I teach my son so he practices gratitude and humility while also having a strong work ethic. But why do so many people neglect to credit luck in their success? Frank points to some evolutionary theories that may explain why these are adaptive behaviors, but although adaptive, it doesn’t mean we can’t work on it.
February 24, 2017
No one wants to believe that all the good things we achieve are the result of chance, or luck, but each one of us knows that finding a good parking space so we were on time for a meeting was plain dumb luck. But we don't continue with that thought, and include the chance meeting with the CEO before the meeting that led to a promotion. And yet, as the author Robert Frank points out, luck plays a role throughout life, and one lucky break becomes magnified over the years.
As part of the discussion, Frank presents results from studies on how believing or not believing in luck affects other behaviors. If people believe they achieved something partly because of chance, or luck, they are more likely to be generous toward others. The discussion if full of interesting studies on human behavior in relation to luck and success.
The final section of the book contains one of Frank's most interesting proposals, a new tax that would supplant all the others we now have, a consumption tax. A person's income would be taxed after deductions for total savings and basic cost of living expenses. If I earn $100K a year (not likely, but this is hypothetical), save $20K and spend $50K on basic living costs (rent, food, insurance, auto, etc.), the remainder is $30K to be spent as I choose. That would be the amount I had left to spend on optional consumers goods, and that is the amount on which I would be taxed. The value of this approach is the reduction in wasteful spending (who really needs a house with 100 room?), the encouragement of saving, and the guarantee that basic needs aren't crushed by taxes. The tax income would cover the needs of the country to support education, infrastructure, military, etc.
This is a short book, written in simple and clear English, offering a different way of looking at our world and how we achieved our place in it. There is much to think about here, and all of it intriguing and interesting.
As part of the discussion, Frank presents results from studies on how believing or not believing in luck affects other behaviors. If people believe they achieved something partly because of chance, or luck, they are more likely to be generous toward others. The discussion if full of interesting studies on human behavior in relation to luck and success.
The final section of the book contains one of Frank's most interesting proposals, a new tax that would supplant all the others we now have, a consumption tax. A person's income would be taxed after deductions for total savings and basic cost of living expenses. If I earn $100K a year (not likely, but this is hypothetical), save $20K and spend $50K on basic living costs (rent, food, insurance, auto, etc.), the remainder is $30K to be spent as I choose. That would be the amount I had left to spend on optional consumers goods, and that is the amount on which I would be taxed. The value of this approach is the reduction in wasteful spending (who really needs a house with 100 room?), the encouragement of saving, and the guarantee that basic needs aren't crushed by taxes. The tax income would cover the needs of the country to support education, infrastructure, military, etc.
This is a short book, written in simple and clear English, offering a different way of looking at our world and how we achieved our place in it. There is much to think about here, and all of it intriguing and interesting.
December 19, 2016
In this book, Robert Frank is doing to things in my opinion.
The first is that success in life is due in large part to luck. Your economic outcomes are dependent on lots of things that can be assigned to random chance outside of the old canard of hard working men pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. I think the case is made in the book for that hypothesis to viewed as mostly true.
The second part is that there should be a progressive consumption tax. This is dropped in the last third of the book, and I had all sorts of questions about how it would be applied. Most of them were answered in an appendix but I’m still not sure how businesses are taxed (if at all in his paradigm).
The problem for me was that these two separate ideas felt very loosely connected. The idea is that since success is random, then we need to prevent the thing where people strive to keep up with the Joneses and spend beyond their means or at the top limit of their means. It seems weird to me because it is designed to discourage spending and growing consumer spending is one of the things that makes capitalism grow – and degrowth in a capitalist economy is recession and people thrown out of jobs and deflation. There seem to be a lot of knock-on effects that are unaddressed here.
For me, though, this seems to be one of those things where it is a solution looking for a problem, and as a reader I wasn’t sold on the solution as much as I was sold on the problem and still wonder about the link between the two.
The first is that success in life is due in large part to luck. Your economic outcomes are dependent on lots of things that can be assigned to random chance outside of the old canard of hard working men pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. I think the case is made in the book for that hypothesis to viewed as mostly true.
The second part is that there should be a progressive consumption tax. This is dropped in the last third of the book, and I had all sorts of questions about how it would be applied. Most of them were answered in an appendix but I’m still not sure how businesses are taxed (if at all in his paradigm).
The problem for me was that these two separate ideas felt very loosely connected. The idea is that since success is random, then we need to prevent the thing where people strive to keep up with the Joneses and spend beyond their means or at the top limit of their means. It seems weird to me because it is designed to discourage spending and growing consumer spending is one of the things that makes capitalism grow – and degrowth in a capitalist economy is recession and people thrown out of jobs and deflation. There seem to be a lot of knock-on effects that are unaddressed here.
For me, though, this seems to be one of those things where it is a solution looking for a problem, and as a reader I wasn’t sold on the solution as much as I was sold on the problem and still wonder about the link between the two.
July 22, 2018
Ignoring luck imperils society
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, by Robert Frank, is a quick and illuminating read about the fundamental role of luck in success, how ignoring that simple truth contributes to wealth inequality, and a straightforward tax-based solution to help mitigate it.
The problem is simple: people who succeed, at anything really, attribute their success solely to hard work and perseverance, negating the ever-present role of luck. And those who don’t succeed are often seen as simply not trying hard enough, or lacking the skill and expertise to succeed, as if somehow deserving of their poor fortune, rather than considering their lack of good fortune.
As Frank points out, there’s a good reason for this — it helps us make our way through an uncaring, often hostile world: “So if believing that talent and effort are all that matter makes it easier to tackle difficult tasks, then denying luck’s importance may be adaptive.”
We lie to ourselves that we’re masters of our own destiny to avoid sitting around paralyzed with fear and doubt: “As with beliefs about luck, then, beliefs about free will might be adaptive even if they are objectively false.”
This is belief is inaccurate of course. Luck — from the country you are born into, the color of your skin, the wealth of your parents, the food your mother ate before you were born, the circle of influence wealth gives you — is completely outside our control, but each element contributes to a cumulative propelling effect that, in addition to effort and tenacity, lead to more opportunities and better potential outcomes.
The problem of course is, without the myriad forms of luck that lead to enrollment in an ivy league school or a job on Wall Street, all the hard work and tenacity in the world still can’t overcome bad or even neutral luck. Admitting to this, which seems pretty straightforward to me, drives some people to distraction, as if it’s an attack on the American dream itself. And NOT owning up to this has dramatic effects on society.
“If being born in a good environment is one of the luckiest things that can happen to anyone, it is failure to appreciate luck’s importance that has done the most to undermine our collective stock of good fortune. That’s because failure to appreciate luck’s importance has made successful people more reluctant to pay the taxes required to support the investments necessary to maintain a good environment.”
Being born lucky (and that can take any number of forms — say, white, straight, into a wealthy family in an affluent neighborhood), and you get to swim with the economic currents. If you’re born unlucky, and start taking away any of those attributes, you have to swim against the currents. Effort, tenacity and personal responsibility still count, it just takes two, three or four times as much to make it half the distance.
The author uses some basic studies from cognitive science — all the biases we carry around with us to justify being the heroes of our own stories — to bring this to light.
He points out that “…those who are oblivious to their own advantages are often similarly oblivious to other people’s disadvantages…”
And he offers a simple tax change to start mitigating against the inequality and lack of opportunity that keep so many swimming against the current: a progressive consumption tax rather than an individual income tax to generate enough revenue to fund a society that can help offset bad luck and create more opportunity.
“…individuals can’t choose the environments into which they’re born. But society as a whole can mold those environments in significant ways. Doing so, however, requires intensive levels of investment. We who were born into highly developed countries are thus the lucky beneficiaries of centuries of intensive investment by those who came before us. In recent decades, however, those investments have been depreciating.”
His proposed tax plan works something like this: people pay taxes on the difference between what they earn and what they save, the money spent on consumption. It’s progressive, so money spent on the basics, say, food and rent, is taxed at a lower rate than money spent on a condo on Park Avenue or a high-end sports car. The tax, in essence, helps re-direct money spent on lavish items into the federal coffers to spend on infrastructure and social investments and, since we’re all in the same boat, it doesn’t feel like the wealthy are being singled out to pay a greater share.
“…being born in a good environment is an enormous stroke of good fortune. More important, it is the one form of good luck over which societies have any significant degree of control. But that control requires high levels of investment, which many societies have lately been reluctant to support.”
It seems like a pretty elegant solution — and one that will progress exactly zero inches under the current administration and in a society that seems determined to redirect the fruits of the economy to the lucky few at the top — deserving of it’s own book.
Still, it’s great to see an author providing an actual, well-thought out solution to wealth inequality and shining a light on the dark side of a society in which so many struggle to get by while a lucky few, with wealth and influence passed from generation to generation, shape policies that prevent others from having the opportunity, with a little luck, to climb the ladder as well.
“People succeed on a spectacular scale, then use some of their gains to win more favorable tax and regulatory treatment, which increases their wealth still further, enabling them to buy even more favorable treatment…”
Positive change, it seems, starts with an appreciation of the role of luck in individual success:
“In the normal course of events, few of us give much thought to how seemingly minor random events often profoundly alter our lives. Failure to give luck its due is of course not the only reason we’ve failed to maintain the environments that so many of us have been fortunate enough to enjoy.”
The book ends on a well-deserved note of caution:
“We could wait for the inevitable financial crisis to occur. Or we could start talking now about why it would make sense to take action more quickly.”
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, by Robert Frank, is a quick and illuminating read about the fundamental role of luck in success, how ignoring that simple truth contributes to wealth inequality, and a straightforward tax-based solution to help mitigate it.
The problem is simple: people who succeed, at anything really, attribute their success solely to hard work and perseverance, negating the ever-present role of luck. And those who don’t succeed are often seen as simply not trying hard enough, or lacking the skill and expertise to succeed, as if somehow deserving of their poor fortune, rather than considering their lack of good fortune.
As Frank points out, there’s a good reason for this — it helps us make our way through an uncaring, often hostile world: “So if believing that talent and effort are all that matter makes it easier to tackle difficult tasks, then denying luck’s importance may be adaptive.”
We lie to ourselves that we’re masters of our own destiny to avoid sitting around paralyzed with fear and doubt: “As with beliefs about luck, then, beliefs about free will might be adaptive even if they are objectively false.”
This is belief is inaccurate of course. Luck — from the country you are born into, the color of your skin, the wealth of your parents, the food your mother ate before you were born, the circle of influence wealth gives you — is completely outside our control, but each element contributes to a cumulative propelling effect that, in addition to effort and tenacity, lead to more opportunities and better potential outcomes.
The problem of course is, without the myriad forms of luck that lead to enrollment in an ivy league school or a job on Wall Street, all the hard work and tenacity in the world still can’t overcome bad or even neutral luck. Admitting to this, which seems pretty straightforward to me, drives some people to distraction, as if it’s an attack on the American dream itself. And NOT owning up to this has dramatic effects on society.
“If being born in a good environment is one of the luckiest things that can happen to anyone, it is failure to appreciate luck’s importance that has done the most to undermine our collective stock of good fortune. That’s because failure to appreciate luck’s importance has made successful people more reluctant to pay the taxes required to support the investments necessary to maintain a good environment.”
Being born lucky (and that can take any number of forms — say, white, straight, into a wealthy family in an affluent neighborhood), and you get to swim with the economic currents. If you’re born unlucky, and start taking away any of those attributes, you have to swim against the currents. Effort, tenacity and personal responsibility still count, it just takes two, three or four times as much to make it half the distance.
The author uses some basic studies from cognitive science — all the biases we carry around with us to justify being the heroes of our own stories — to bring this to light.
He points out that “…those who are oblivious to their own advantages are often similarly oblivious to other people’s disadvantages…”
And he offers a simple tax change to start mitigating against the inequality and lack of opportunity that keep so many swimming against the current: a progressive consumption tax rather than an individual income tax to generate enough revenue to fund a society that can help offset bad luck and create more opportunity.
“…individuals can’t choose the environments into which they’re born. But society as a whole can mold those environments in significant ways. Doing so, however, requires intensive levels of investment. We who were born into highly developed countries are thus the lucky beneficiaries of centuries of intensive investment by those who came before us. In recent decades, however, those investments have been depreciating.”
His proposed tax plan works something like this: people pay taxes on the difference between what they earn and what they save, the money spent on consumption. It’s progressive, so money spent on the basics, say, food and rent, is taxed at a lower rate than money spent on a condo on Park Avenue or a high-end sports car. The tax, in essence, helps re-direct money spent on lavish items into the federal coffers to spend on infrastructure and social investments and, since we’re all in the same boat, it doesn’t feel like the wealthy are being singled out to pay a greater share.
“…being born in a good environment is an enormous stroke of good fortune. More important, it is the one form of good luck over which societies have any significant degree of control. But that control requires high levels of investment, which many societies have lately been reluctant to support.”
It seems like a pretty elegant solution — and one that will progress exactly zero inches under the current administration and in a society that seems determined to redirect the fruits of the economy to the lucky few at the top — deserving of it’s own book.
Still, it’s great to see an author providing an actual, well-thought out solution to wealth inequality and shining a light on the dark side of a society in which so many struggle to get by while a lucky few, with wealth and influence passed from generation to generation, shape policies that prevent others from having the opportunity, with a little luck, to climb the ladder as well.
“People succeed on a spectacular scale, then use some of their gains to win more favorable tax and regulatory treatment, which increases their wealth still further, enabling them to buy even more favorable treatment…”
Positive change, it seems, starts with an appreciation of the role of luck in individual success:
“In the normal course of events, few of us give much thought to how seemingly minor random events often profoundly alter our lives. Failure to give luck its due is of course not the only reason we’ve failed to maintain the environments that so many of us have been fortunate enough to enjoy.”
The book ends on a well-deserved note of caution:
“We could wait for the inevitable financial crisis to occur. Or we could start talking now about why it would make sense to take action more quickly.”
December 4, 2023
Quick read, substantive yet accessible. Prospective readers should be aware that "Success and Luck" is primarily a promotion of the idea of the progressive consumption tax, one of Frank's professional convictions that he has discussed at length in some of his older works, including "The Darwin Economy." But, wisely, rather than promote a consumption tax using wonkish language, statistics, and graphs, Frank couches the discussion in personal anecdotes and experiences about the role of luck in success. In essence, he argues for the consumption tax by pointing out that the most successful individuals -- though extraordinarily talented and hard working -- always benefit from some measure of luck, so they should not begrudge leaving the ladder to success set up for those behind them by funding key infrastructure through taxes. And to better focus tax burdens on those who can afford to shoulder it, why not tax excessive consumption -- elaborate weddings, supercar purchases, absurdly enormous mansions, etc? This way it's largely the uber rich that fill tax coffers, while savings are encouraged.
"Success and Luck" is an easy read, is well-argued, and makes a compelling case for a policy proposal that has not yet, but may soon, gained political traction.
"Success and Luck" is an easy read, is well-argued, and makes a compelling case for a policy proposal that has not yet, but may soon, gained political traction.
November 24, 2024
Judging by the title, I thought that this book would be about how the rich and famous are largely in those positions because of a fair dose of luck. But that doesn’t seem to be what it’s all about. Admittedly, I’m writing this review just based on the Blinkist summary of the book. And that’s hardly fair to the author. But, I have found the Blinkist summaries to be remarkably good in extracting the main essence of a book, whenever I’ve had the chance to compare with the original book. Anyway, the following are some extracts, that seem to capture the gist of the book:
If you get swiped by somebody opening a car door when you’re riding a bike you replay the bike accident in your mind, it will seem all so preventable. This phenomenon is called hindsight bias, the predisposition to assume after the fact that an event was predictable, even when it wasn't.......What's more, hindsight bias is widely applicable, especially when we consider fame and success.
For example, it wasn't until 1911 that the Mona Lisa began achieving the fame it enjoys today. In that year, an Italian, Vincenzo Peruggia, stole it from the Louvre in Paris. When he,
and the painting, emerged two years later in Florence, its reputation had soared.
The point is, as humans we tend to explain away history and trends as predictable, especially when hindsight is applied. {So is he equating this with luck?....It seems like it}.
In the past, it was cheaper to buy locally than to ship in from elsewhere. But now that transport networks have made our markets global, local businesses must compete globally.
the internet has only exacerbated this. Customers can find anything online and have it shipped to them. As a result, those businesses that are already big prosper, while smaller local businesses find the odds stacked against them.....Indoctrinated by modern economic thinking, we might assume that the markets are justly rewarding the best entertainers and the most efficient businesses. But, as we'll explore in the next blink, plain good luck likely contributes far more to their success than we might like to think.’’’{Well also being bigger if that can just be attributed to luck}.
In truth, luck can be the deciding factor in close contests......Consider the impact of wind direction in eight world records in track and field. Seven of the eight world record holders, taking into account men and women, in the 100m, the triple jump, the long jump and the 110m hurdles were lucky enough to have had a tail wind behind them when they set these records. [Well, I guess it is luck that these records were not disqualified but the wind is a factor that should be taken into account].
If you are taxed more, so are other people like you, which means your relative buying power stays the same.....What’s more, your social standing stays the same as well. [Suddenly we have moved from luck and success into taxation policy...this seems a very strange segue].
Well-spent tax revenues create the preconditions to cultivate luck. If you're born in a wealthy country, you're going to benefit from infrastructure built with tax money. Roads, good schools and robust legal systems are made and maintained with that cash......It's nonsensical for the rich to oppose the higher taxes that helped them succeed in the first place.
This is where luck comes in. If we acknowledge its importance in success, we also need to face the fact that we need to pay enough taxes. [What? Where did this connection come from?]
In 1980, the average American wedding cost $11,000 (inflation accounted for). By 2014, that sum had risen to $30,000. We're happy to spend such crazy amounts because we see other people doing it.......Remarkably, the Social Science Research Network showed in 2014 that spending more on your wedding day actually decreases the chances of you and your partner staying together.
So, if you want your children to get better schooling, you might want to consider moving to that fancy neighbourhood. In the end, your hand has been forced by the reckless spending of others......If people aren’t thrifty but instead decide to blow their cash on luxury items, there will be less money in their pockets at the end of the day. As a consequence, they'll do what they can to pay less taxes. [Ok no argument with this but what’s that got to do with luck?]
People will then start turning to privatized amenities such as private schools or security services, which further increases inequality.
The answer lies in something called the progressive consumption tax. In tax speak, that means making savings deductible from taxation.....We should give up the current progressive income tax model in favour of a much more steeply progressive consumption tax.........This means rates would start low but increase quickly if you earn more and spend more.......You will be taxed less for saving more.....It’s a progressive tax plan, rich people will pay more,
It would alter people’s spending patterns and money would quickly be invested in infrastructure and education. In short, by reorganizing the tax system, we would keep ourselves lucky. The richer and more successful would also be helping middle-income families who are under increasing pressure to make ends meet.
The key message in this book: Without luck, success as we know it would not exist. Few of the great success stories in the arts, sports or business world would have progressed to such great heights entirely on their own. Luck plays a huge part, especially when the stakes are high. If we cut funding for public services, we will only undermine ourselves and our societies; it’s these institutions that keep us lucky and ensure that we succeed as a society.
My overall take on this book. It is a very strange logic flow. Basically, a lot of success is due to luck. Ok, I have no great arguments with this thesis. But then he moves into tax policy arguing that if a consumption tax is implemented that would be fairer.....Ok, maybe. But then he claims that the taxes will be spent on projects that will benefit everybody and increase the luck for everybody. That seems over-reach to my way of thinking.
Not at all impressed with the book.....though maybe I’ve missed a lot by dealing only with the Summary. But one star from me.
If you get swiped by somebody opening a car door when you’re riding a bike you replay the bike accident in your mind, it will seem all so preventable. This phenomenon is called hindsight bias, the predisposition to assume after the fact that an event was predictable, even when it wasn't.......What's more, hindsight bias is widely applicable, especially when we consider fame and success.
For example, it wasn't until 1911 that the Mona Lisa began achieving the fame it enjoys today. In that year, an Italian, Vincenzo Peruggia, stole it from the Louvre in Paris. When he,
and the painting, emerged two years later in Florence, its reputation had soared.
The point is, as humans we tend to explain away history and trends as predictable, especially when hindsight is applied. {So is he equating this with luck?....It seems like it}.
In the past, it was cheaper to buy locally than to ship in from elsewhere. But now that transport networks have made our markets global, local businesses must compete globally.
the internet has only exacerbated this. Customers can find anything online and have it shipped to them. As a result, those businesses that are already big prosper, while smaller local businesses find the odds stacked against them.....Indoctrinated by modern economic thinking, we might assume that the markets are justly rewarding the best entertainers and the most efficient businesses. But, as we'll explore in the next blink, plain good luck likely contributes far more to their success than we might like to think.’’’{Well also being bigger if that can just be attributed to luck}.
In truth, luck can be the deciding factor in close contests......Consider the impact of wind direction in eight world records in track and field. Seven of the eight world record holders, taking into account men and women, in the 100m, the triple jump, the long jump and the 110m hurdles were lucky enough to have had a tail wind behind them when they set these records. [Well, I guess it is luck that these records were not disqualified but the wind is a factor that should be taken into account].
If you are taxed more, so are other people like you, which means your relative buying power stays the same.....What’s more, your social standing stays the same as well. [Suddenly we have moved from luck and success into taxation policy...this seems a very strange segue].
Well-spent tax revenues create the preconditions to cultivate luck. If you're born in a wealthy country, you're going to benefit from infrastructure built with tax money. Roads, good schools and robust legal systems are made and maintained with that cash......It's nonsensical for the rich to oppose the higher taxes that helped them succeed in the first place.
This is where luck comes in. If we acknowledge its importance in success, we also need to face the fact that we need to pay enough taxes. [What? Where did this connection come from?]
In 1980, the average American wedding cost $11,000 (inflation accounted for). By 2014, that sum had risen to $30,000. We're happy to spend such crazy amounts because we see other people doing it.......Remarkably, the Social Science Research Network showed in 2014 that spending more on your wedding day actually decreases the chances of you and your partner staying together.
So, if you want your children to get better schooling, you might want to consider moving to that fancy neighbourhood. In the end, your hand has been forced by the reckless spending of others......If people aren’t thrifty but instead decide to blow their cash on luxury items, there will be less money in their pockets at the end of the day. As a consequence, they'll do what they can to pay less taxes. [Ok no argument with this but what’s that got to do with luck?]
People will then start turning to privatized amenities such as private schools or security services, which further increases inequality.
The answer lies in something called the progressive consumption tax. In tax speak, that means making savings deductible from taxation.....We should give up the current progressive income tax model in favour of a much more steeply progressive consumption tax.........This means rates would start low but increase quickly if you earn more and spend more.......You will be taxed less for saving more.....It’s a progressive tax plan, rich people will pay more,
It would alter people’s spending patterns and money would quickly be invested in infrastructure and education. In short, by reorganizing the tax system, we would keep ourselves lucky. The richer and more successful would also be helping middle-income families who are under increasing pressure to make ends meet.
The key message in this book: Without luck, success as we know it would not exist. Few of the great success stories in the arts, sports or business world would have progressed to such great heights entirely on their own. Luck plays a huge part, especially when the stakes are high. If we cut funding for public services, we will only undermine ourselves and our societies; it’s these institutions that keep us lucky and ensure that we succeed as a society.
My overall take on this book. It is a very strange logic flow. Basically, a lot of success is due to luck. Ok, I have no great arguments with this thesis. But then he moves into tax policy arguing that if a consumption tax is implemented that would be fairer.....Ok, maybe. But then he claims that the taxes will be spent on projects that will benefit everybody and increase the luck for everybody. That seems over-reach to my way of thinking.
Not at all impressed with the book.....though maybe I’ve missed a lot by dealing only with the Summary. But one star from me.
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