The radical moral implications of luck in human life

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/21/17687402/kylie-jenner-luck-human-life-moral-privilege

By David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com Aug 21, 2018

Recently, there was a minor uproar when Kardashian scion Kylie Jenner, who is all of 21, appeared on the cover of Forbes’s 60 richest self-made women issue. As many people pointed out, Jenner’s success would have been impossible if she hadn’t been born white, healthy, rich, and famous. She built a successful cosmetics company not just with hard work but on a towering foundation of good luck.

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These episodes illustrate what seems to be one of the enduring themes of our age: socially dominant groups, recipients of myriad unearned advantages, willfully refusing to acknowledge them, despite persistent efforts from socially disadvantaged groups. This is not a new theme, of course — it waxes and wanes with circumstance — but after a multi-decade rise in inequality, it has come roaring back to the fore.

Of course, socially dominant groups have every incentive to ignore luck. And they have found a patron saint in President Trump, who once claimed, “My father gave me a very small loan in 1975, and I built it into a company that’s worth many, many billions of dollars.”

These recent controversies reminded me of the fuss around a book that came out a few years ago: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, by economist Robert Frank. (Vox’s Sean Illing interviewed Frank last year.) It argued that luck plays a large role in every human success and failure, which ought to be a rather banal and uncontroversial point, but the reaction of many commentators was gobsmacked outrage. On Fox Business, Stuart Varney sputtered at Frank: “Do you know how insulting that was, when I read that?”

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Building a more compassionate society means reminding ourselves of luck, and of the gratitude and obligations it entails, against inevitable resistance.

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Both nature and nurture happen to you

Of course it is true that you have no choice when it comes to your genes, your hair color, your basic body shape and appearance, your vulnerability to certain diseases. You’re stuck with what nature gives you — and it does not distribute its blessings equitably or according to merit.

But you also have no choice when it comes to the vast bulk of the nurture that matters.

Child development psychologists tell us that deep and lasting shaping of neural pathways happens in the first hours, days, months, and years of life. Basic dispositions are formed that can last a lifetime. Whether you are held, spoken to, fed, made to feel safe and cared for — you have no choice in any of it, but it more or less forms your emotional skeleton. It determines how sensitive you are to threat, how open you are to new experience, your capacity to exercise empathy. [Also, whether you were deprived of oxygen when you were born, your nutrition and exposure to pollutants before you were born.]

Children aren’t responsible for how they spend their formative years and the permanent imprint it makes upon them. But they’re stuck with it.

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Here, a distinction made famous by psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his seminal Thinking, Fast and Slow is helpful. Kahneman argues that humans have two modes of thinking: “system one,” which is fast, instinctual, automatic, and often unconscious, and “system two,” which is slower, more deliberative, and emotionally “cooler” (generally traced to the prefrontal cortex).

Our system one reactions are largely hardwired by the time we become adults. But what about system two?

We do seem to have some control over it. We can use it, to some extent, to shape, channel, or even change our system one reactions over time — to change ourselves.

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There are two reasons why system-two thinking can’t get us out of the luck trap: Both the capacity and the need for system-two thinking are inequitably distributed.

First, the capacity.

Using system two to regulate system one is difficult. Exercising the kind of self-discipline necessary to override system one reactions with deliberative, system-two choices is effortful. It drains energy. (See Brian Resnick’s fascinating discussion of the famous “marshmallow test” for more on this.)

Doing it requires certain conditions: a degree of self-possession, a degree of freedom from more basic physical needs like food and shelter, some training and habituation. Even with those advantages, it’s difficult. There’s an entire “life hacking” genre devoted to tricks and techniques that system-two thinking can use to counteract system one’s predilections for salty snacks and procrastination.

And the thing is, not everyone has equal access to those conditions. Whether and how much you have the ability to exercise system two in this way is largely — you guessed it — part of your inheritance. It too depends on where you were born, how you were raised, the resources to which you had access.

Even our desire and ability to alter our trajectory is largely determined by our trajectory.

Second, the need.

Some people don’t much need the ability to self-regulate, because their failures of self-regulation are forgiven and forgotten. If you are, say, a white male born to wealth, like Donald Trump, you can blunder about and fuck up over and over again. You’ll always have access to more money and social connections; the justice system will always go easy on you; you’ll always get more second chances. You could even be president someday, without being required to learn anything or develop any skills relevant to the job.

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Neither the capacity nor the need for self-regulation is distributed evenly or fairly. In a dark irony, we demand much more of it from those — the poor, the hungry, the homeless or housing-insecure — likely to have the least access to the conditions that make it possible. (Just one more way it’s expensive to be poor.)

Your capacity for self-regulation and self-improvement, and your need for them, are both part of your inheritance. They come to you via life’s lottery. Via luck.

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Of course, people aren’t nearly as eager to take credit for their failures and flaws. Psychologists have shown that all humans are subject to “fundamental attribution error.” When we assess others, we tend to attribute successes to circumstance and failures to character — and when we assess our own lives, it is the opposite. Everyone’s relationship with luck is somewhat self-interested and opportunistic.

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Acknowledging luck — or, more broadly, the pervasive influence on our lives of factors we did not choose and for which we deserve no credit or blame — does not mean denying all agency. It doesn’t mean people are nothing more than the sum of their inheritances, or that merit has no role in outcomes. It doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be held responsible for bad things they do or rewarded for good things. Nor does it necessarily mean going full socialist. These are all familiar straw men in this debate.

No, it just means that no one “deserves” hunger, homelessness, ill health, or subjugation — and ultimately, no one “deserves” giant fortunes either. All such outcomes involve a large portion of luck.

The promise of great financial reward spurs risk-taking, market competition, and innovation. Markets, properly regulated, are a socially healthy form of gambling. There’s no reason to try to completely equalize market outcomes. But there’s also no reason to allow hunger, homelessness, ill health, or subjugation.

And there’s no reason we shouldn’t ask everyone, especially those who have benefited most from luck — from being born a certain place, a certain color, to certain people in a certain economic bracket, sent to certain schools, introduced to certain people — to chip in to help those upon whom life’s lottery bestowed fewer gifts.

And it is entirely possible to do both, to harness market competition while using the wealth it generates to raise up the unlucky and give them greater access to that very competition.

“If you want meritocracy,” Chris Hayes argued in his seminal book Twilight of the Elites, “work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish.”

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We cannot eliminate luck, nor achieve total equality, but it is easily within our grasp to soften luck’s harsher effects, to ensure that no one falls too far, that everyone has access to a life of dignity. Before that can happen, though, we must look luck square in the face.