Luck - IV

Nassim Taleb makes a distinction between two types of occupations. Non-scalable occupations are like those of a dentist, baker,cook, etc.  where you need to invest additional time and effort for each unit of production. Scalable occupations are like those of an author, movie star, equity trader etc. where the the amount of work required doesn't increase with production. A writer, for example, has to put in the same amount of work to gain one or a million readers.

In a non-scalable occupation, the element of skill is more easily discernible. A scalable occupation is more dependant on luck and produces huge inequalities where a few can earn a lot leaving others with the crumbs even though there may not be such a wide difference between the two groups. In any individual case, it will be more difficult to decide how much of luck and how much of skill contributed to the success.

Every year, the literary agent John Brockman asks several public intellectuals to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. One year he asked many scientists to give their favorite equation. Daniel Kahneman gave the following:

success = talent +luck

great success = a little more talent + lot of luck

I will just add that even the skill that one possesses is a matter of luck - it depends on the combination of genes that you are born with and the environment you are born into, both of which you cannot control.

There is also the contingency that  the society that you are born into values the talents that you process.For eg. if Tendulkar had been born in Mali with the same talent for hitting with a wooden implement a leather missile thrown at speed, he would not have become a star. He would also not have become as good as he did because he would not have had the motivation to improve his skills.He worked hard because he knew that the skills that he possessed were honoured and rewarded in the society in which he lived. (A school student said that he needs to study only till Std. X and he will become a crorepati. Why? Tendulkar studied only till Std X! This is is another type of delusion similar to thinking that if you drop out of college and have a garage, you will become a billionaire!)
Michael Sandel writes in Justice:

The successful often overlook this contingent aspect of their success. Many of us are fortunate to process, at least in some measure, the qualities that our society happens to prize. In a capitalist society, it helps to have entrepreneurial drive. In a bureaucratic society, it helps to get on easily and smoothly with superiors. In a mass democratic society, it helps to look good on television, and to speak in short, superficial sound bites. In a litigious society, it helps to go to law school, and to have the logical and reasoning skills that will allow you to score well on the LSATs.

[SNIP]

So, while we are entitled to the benefits that the rules of the game promise for the exercise of our talents, it is a mistake and  a conceit to suppose that we deserve in the first place a society that values the qualities we have in abundance.

You may say that life is unfair, that nature distributes talents unequally and the luck of social circumstances cannot be helped. Well, nature is neither fair nor unfair; it just is. In the words of the poet A.E. Housman, it 'neither  knows nor cares'. As the philosopher John Rawls said, 'What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.' You cannot derive values from facts. Making this error is called naturalistic fallacy.

The philosopher John Rawls considered what formal principles of justice rational and mutually disinterested persons would choose in the original position of equality behind the veil of ignorance unaware of the talents and status they will inherit at birth. If you didn't know your own place in society, there is always the chance that once the veil is removed, you might find yourself among the least advantaged economically and/or a persecuted minority.

According to Rawls, two principles of justice would emerge from such a thought experiment. The first would be that the person would choose a society which would provide equal basic liberties for all which would take priority over considerations of social utility and general welfare. The second choice, knowing that you could be dealt a lousy hand, would be to be born in a society where the most disadvantaged are cared for.

Rawls is not suggesting a levelling equality of the type parodied in Harrison Bergerson, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut.The sociologist Andre Beteille makes a distinction between equality and universality. Universality is the idea of providing primary education and health care to all citizens irrespective of merit. It is concerned with providing the basic necessities and not with everything that human beings may desire at any point of time.

All this does not mean that hard-work, determination, punctuality, etc are not important.  What it indicates is that these qualities are not sufficient attributes for ensuring success. Many successful people have an attribution bias - they attribute their success to their skill and their failures to randomness. It is a wonder that many people seem to  be  convinced of the absurd notion that success is a simple function of individual effort. In The Blank Slate, Stephen Pinker writes about the trade-off between freedom and material equity:

The major political philosophies can be defined by how they deal with the trade-off.  The Social Darwinist right places no values on equality; the totalitarian left places no value on freedom. The Rawlsian left sacrifices some freedom for equality; the libertarian right sacrifices some equality for freedom.  While reasonable people may disagree about the best trade-off, it is unreasonable to pretend there is no trade-off.