https://archive.is/oM6Es
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S33/87/54K53/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment-jan-june12-michaellewis_06-13/
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One night I was invited to a dinner, where I sat next to the wife of a big shot at a giant Wall Street investment bank, called Salomon Brothers. She more or less forced her husband to give me a job.
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The book I wrote was called "Liar’s Poker." It sold a million copies. I was 28 years old. I had a career, a little fame, a small fortune and a new life narrative. All of a sudden people were telling me I was a born writer. This was absurd. Even I could see there was another, truer narrative, with luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm from which to write the story of the age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of the business? Of having parents who didn't disinherit me but instead sighed and said "do it if you must?" Of having had that sense of must kindled inside of me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in the first place?
This isn't just false humility. It's false humility with a point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.
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Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.
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The public reaction was fascinating, because Lewis received praise for his comments, as if he were arguing against an entitlement mentality. But he confuses the nature of responsibility (very badly) and assumes that if a beneficial accident befalls you (luck), other individuals who had absolutely nothing to do with your good fortune, somehow have a right to benefit as well.
And by emphasizing luck as a critical element of success, he effectively undercuts the nature of individual rights, while at the same time justifying an entitlement mentality.
If luck really does create an obligation, then everyone is entitled to part of the good fortune of anyone who is in any way better off than them, if any accidents contributed to the success of the one who is better off. This means no one has a right to any advantage that is a result of anything they are not directly responsible for — anyone worse off has a claim against them, and they have a claim against anyone better off.
Such views certainly will not help combat the public’s tendency to think in terms of entitlement.
If you read Lewis's book 'Liar's Poker', you will know why he thinks ‘luck’ is so important — for him, it really was huge — his first big job (and the fodder for his first book) came from him simply happening to be in the right place at the right time. As he also stated in his Princeton speech, he happened to sit next to a helpful person at a social engagement (the wife of a Wall Street investment banker) — it is actually that person he owes a debt to, and not all the so-called 'unlucky' people who were not sitting there and did not get that job. So it is not surprising that he would want to pretend that other successful people were also primarily lucky. Hard won successes make his success look silly and unearned by comparison.
I think I know why this seemed to resonate with so many people — as much as some people may say it is an argument against an entitlement mentality, the attempt to emphasize luck will help to engender that very attitude, since there will always be some group or class of people that the majority of people can view as 'luckier than me' — but more than that, it is a rationalization that denigrates the hard earned success of people that were unlucky. Isn't it flattering to think that all the people that are more successful than I am were just luckier, and that I would be just as successful as them, if I had their 'luck'.
It is certainly obvious that good fortune can be enormously helpful. For example, being born in a relatively free country with opportunities, and the mental capacity to take advantage of those opportunities, is huge — but millions of people are born into such circumstances and can be considered ‘lucky’ by comparison to millions of others around the world, but even with such ‘luck’ they are never able to achieve any kind of success — clearly, individual traits, like determination and a willingness to work hard, are at least as important — and there are obvious examples of individuals who are clearly ‘unlucky’ in many ways, and yet achieve more than many others who would be considered ‘lucky’. Luck obviously helps, but it's just as obviously not decisive in an individual's success, in anything but the most extreme sense (like not being born in a North Korean prison camp).
Thomas Sowell’s book ‘A Personal Odyssey’ is just one example that stands as a stark contradiction to this way of thinking. Certainly, no reasonable person would describe Sowell's success as largely due to luck — he had to fight all the way. I cannot help but wonder what would have happened to Michael Lewis (or myself) had we been dealt just some of Sowell's 'luck'. But by Michael Lewis's way of thinking, Sowell must be lucky, since he did achieve success, and, according to Lewis, 'life's outcomes have a huge amount of luck baked into them'.
Clearly, Michael Lewis's perspective on success, is not a good one to use in judging the particular successes of others.
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