Romney pouncing on
Obama’s statement “you didn’t build that” got me thinking about success and
luck and community. Romney took
Obama’s words out of context and contends that the President is hostile to
successful small businesses and always looks to government for the
answers.
When the entire
quotation is examined, it is clear that Obama is saying that successful people
are helped “by personal mentors and government policies that support
infrastructure and technology.”
Here is what the President said in Roanoke, Virginia on July 13, 2012:
“If
you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a
great teacher somewhere in your life.
Somebody helped to create this unbelievable system that we have that
allowed you to thrive. Somebody
invested in roads and bridges. If
you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/as-romney-obama-spar-over-you-didnt-build-that-small-businesses-add-context/2012/07/25/gJQA6IN79W_story.html)
What interests me here
is not the election speeches and ads; what interests me is the expression of
two different views of American culture.
“One
narrative puts the big gamble at the center of American life: from the earliest English settlements
at Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay, risky ventures in real estate (and other
less palpable commodities) power the progress of a fluid, mobile democracy….
The other narrative exalts a different sort of hero – a disciplined self-made
man, whose success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant)
virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” (Jackson Lears, Something for
Nothing. New York: Penguin Group, 2003)
In the first narrative,
luck contributes to success or failure and net worth may not correlate with
moral worth. In the second, luck
does not play a role in success and net worth in this world does reflect moral
worth.
Conservatives regard
success in the marketplace as due to the individual’s hard work and skill. Liberals believe that hardworking folks
can fail because of bad luck and events beyond their control. No wonder Romney and Obama are arguing
over what causes success or failure. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/business/of-luck-and-success-economic-view.html)
When I read Daniel
Kahneman’s superb summary of behavioral economics, Thinking, Fast and Slow, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2011) I was surprised to find two formulas
dealing with success. Kahneman
describes these two formulas as his favorites: “Success = luck + talent; Great success = a little more
talent + a lot of luck.” He also
states, “Luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always
easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable
achievement into a mediocre outcome.”
Recent research on
online markets concludes that the link between quality and success is
uncertain. The best products
sometimes fail, and the worst products sometimes succeed. Success in the marketplace for products
that are not the best or the worst is mostly due to luck.
In the research, a
control group listened to music by obscure bands and rated them without knowing
what others thought of the songs.
The researchers then compared the results of the control group with
results from eight other versions of the study where participants could see how
many times each song had been downloaded and its average rating. The researchers concluded that if a few
early listeners disliked the song it would fail. If a few early listeners liked the same song it could go on
to be a winner in the contest.
“The song ‘Lockdown,’ by the band 52 Metro, is a case in point. Ranked
26th out of 48 in the objective ratings, it finished at No. 1 in one
of the eight groups, but at No. 40 in another.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/business/of-luck-and-success-economic-view.html)
Michael Lewis, the
enormously successful writer of books like Liar’s
Poker and Moneyball, gave the 2012
commencement speech at his alma mater, Princeton. He described how an art history major ended up at 28 years
old the author of a best selling business book with a little fame, a small
fortune, and new life narrative.
“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 an 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 me by a professor of art history at Princeton? Of having been let into Princeton in
the first place?”
Later in the speech, he
observes that the true narrative of his successful career makes many in America
uncomfortable.
“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.” (http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/06/09/author-michael-lewis-commencement-speech-lucky-you/)
It is hard to imagine
Mitt Romney giving a similar commencement speech. It is easy to identify Romney
with the narrative that has no place for luck in the story of his personal
success. Romney clearly believes in the dominant culture of control where
everything from universities to medicine is valued by the marketplace.
“The
new rhetoricians of progress believed that their success was the product of a
meritocratic process, that they were the type who took chances successfully,
that their superior skill and drive allowed them to make their own luck – and
that history was on their side.
This is a fair summary of the dominant mood within managerial
professional elites, amid the triumphalist atmosphere of the American fin de
siècle. (Jackson Lears, Something
for Nothing. New York: Penguin
Group, 2003)
Contrast that point of
view with Tim Berners-Lee who invented the world wide web without cashing in to
become a millionaire.
“People
have sometimes asked me whether I am upset that I have not made a lot of money
from the Web. In fact, I made some quite conscious decisions about which
way to take my life. These I would not change…. What does distress me, though,
is how important a question it seems to be maddening is the terrible notion that
a person’s value depends on how important and financially successful they are,
and that that is measured in terms of money. That suggests disrespect for
the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science
and technology. Core in my upbringing was a value system that put
monetary gain well in its place, behind things like doing what I really want to
do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set
our children’s sights on cash rather than on things that will actually make
them happy.”
(Tim
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The
Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. San
Francisco: Harper, 1999)
In the afterword to the 25th
Anniversary Edition of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern
World (New York: Vintage, 2007), Lewis Hyde describes why he wrote his book
about the parts of the world that do not work well under the marketplace
theory:
“The
first is simply that there are categories of human enterprise that are not well
organized or supported by market forces.
Family life, religious life, public service, pure science, and of course
much artistic practice: none of
these operates very well when framed simply in terms of exchange value. The second assumption follows: any community that values these things
will find nonmarket ways to organize them. It will develop gift-exchange institutions dedicated to
their support.”
The
Gift is a great place to start thinking
about the tension between the two narratives described in the beginning of this
blog post. The current tension in
the medical scientific community between knowledge being a gift or a commodity
is nicely summarized in this quotation by MIT Geneticist Jonathan Kind:
“’In
the past one of the strengths of American bio-medical science was the
free
exchange of materials, strains of organisms and information…But now, if you
sanction and institutionalize private gain and parenting of microorganisms,
then you don’t send out your strains because you don’t want them in the public
sector. That’s already happening
now. People are no longer sharing their strains of bacteria and their results
as freely as they did in the past.’”
Those of us who have won Warren
Buffett’s “ovarian lottery” and have experienced a modicum of worldly success
might living in the United States of America should constantly remind ourselves
that we are indeed lucky. We
should heed the conclusion of Lewis’ commencement speech:
“You
are the lucky few. Lucky in your
parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that
can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase
their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest
society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to
sacrifice your interests to anything.” (http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2012/06/09/author-michael-lewis-commencement-speech-lucky-you/)
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