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A review by charleseliot
Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank
4.0
Brief and valuable.
The author makes some key claims:
- Luck plays a much bigger part in success than we admit. We focus instead on the contributions of skill and effort. Skill and effort are essential, but by focusing too much on them we promote the ideas that success is deserved and winning reflects personal values. This then blinds us to the value of helping each other. (Caveat: we also need to be careful not to over-focus on luck and reduce the impetus for people to work hard and develop skills.)
- As competition gets harder - that is, as more contestants show up with high levels of skill and effort - the contribution of luck gets proportionately greater.
- Winner-takes-all competitions give disproportionate rewards to the winners. A little bit of luck early on can create cascading advantages as life goes on.
- Our notions of what it means to be "winning" are relative and situational. This in turn can lead to massive economic waste. When the average wedding in New York City costs $30,000 you need to spend $40,000 for your wedding to be special, even though both sums are way beyond any need.
- Relative expectations can be reset if everybody is in on the reset. If everybody in NYC decided they should spend half of what they spend today on weddings, nobody would be any less happy, and all that money could be redirected to more globally valuable goals.
- A progressive national consumption tax has the potential to drive a country-wide reset on consumption patterns, thereby promoting savings over consumption, and reducing the amount of waste in the economy.
Frank has been shilling for progressive consumption taxation for years, so I suspect he would frame the entire book as yet another argument for his pet project. That's fine, even if you don't buy his proposal. The rest of the book is informative, entertaining and thought-provoking.
The author makes some key claims:
- Luck plays a much bigger part in success than we admit. We focus instead on the contributions of skill and effort. Skill and effort are essential, but by focusing too much on them we promote the ideas that success is deserved and winning reflects personal values. This then blinds us to the value of helping each other. (Caveat: we also need to be careful not to over-focus on luck and reduce the impetus for people to work hard and develop skills.)
- As competition gets harder - that is, as more contestants show up with high levels of skill and effort - the contribution of luck gets proportionately greater.
- Winner-takes-all competitions give disproportionate rewards to the winners. A little bit of luck early on can create cascading advantages as life goes on.
- Our notions of what it means to be "winning" are relative and situational. This in turn can lead to massive economic waste. When the average wedding in New York City costs $30,000 you need to spend $40,000 for your wedding to be special, even though both sums are way beyond any need.
- Relative expectations can be reset if everybody is in on the reset. If everybody in NYC decided they should spend half of what they spend today on weddings, nobody would be any less happy, and all that money could be redirected to more globally valuable goals.
- A progressive national consumption tax has the potential to drive a country-wide reset on consumption patterns, thereby promoting savings over consumption, and reducing the amount of waste in the economy.
Frank has been shilling for progressive consumption taxation for years, so I suspect he would frame the entire book as yet another argument for his pet project. That's fine, even if you don't buy his proposal. The rest of the book is informative, entertaining and thought-provoking.