Ask Yourself: Do I Feel Lucky? Well, do you…..?

Bad luck and trouble, two of my best friends – Sam (Lightnin’) Hopkins/Mack McCormick

You can spend a lot of time reading about things that seem social sciencey, but are in fact pure politics. One example of what I’m talking about is the following non-question: what matters more in life, luck or talent?

It’s not a scientific question because 1) luck is impossible to measure, 2) talent is only measured approximately, at best, and 3) there is no scale on which one can put a life to decide the ‘more’ part of the question.

However, political types, by which I mean politicians, advocates, activists and ‘experts’ are happy to go on and on about which matters more, and they are all quite sure they know the answer.

An Opinion piece showed up in the Feb 21 Report on Business section of the Globe on this non-question, titled Rich and successful? It’s likely you’re just lucky. Written by Mark Rank, said to be a Professor of Social Welfare at Washington University in St Louis, the piece is labelled as being ‘Special to the Globe and Mail’, which I think just means that Rank is not on the staff of the Globe.

It was a very annoying article.

Let me explain.

In his piece Rank weighs in on the side of luck in this debate, and I’m not writing to argue against that position; as I wrote, it’s a pointless argument. I’m writing because Rank badly mis-characterizes a piece of academic research in supporting his position. He writes:

“Take the case of who becomes wealthy and who experiences poverty. It turns out that the random factor is very much in play. In a fascinating research article titled Talent Versus Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure, mathematical physicist Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues were able to empirically quantify the relative importance of talent versus luck in terms of acquiring great wealth over a 40-year working-age lifespan. What they found was that the most talented people almost never reached the peaks of economic success – rather, the ones most likely to achieve the pinnacle of wealth were those with more average talents but who happened to catch a couple of lucky breaks.”

Before I explain what is wrong here, I doff my hat to Professor Rank for apparently citing some actual research, and for including in his article a link to the paper he is citing. That happens all too rarely.

The above paragraph makes the research of Pluchino and colleagues seem like it is about real people, living ’40-year working-age lifespan(s)’, right? And, it seems that for these ‘people’ it turned out that the ‘most talented people’ were not generally the ones to achieve ‘the pinnacle of wealth’. Rather it was those people with good luck who did well.

That could hardly be further from the truth of what the Puchino article does.

To start with, his statement that Pluchino and colleagues “…were able to empirically quantify the relative importance of talent versus luck…” is flat out wrong. The adjective ‘empirically’ says that they observed people and recorded what they observed to support their ‘luck matters more than talent’ claim. [Merriam Webster – empiric: capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment; originating in or based on observation or experience.] They observed no one, they gathered no data about anybody.

In fact, what the Pluchino et al paper does is report on the construction of a mathematical model, in which the authors interpret their purely mathematical result as demonstrating that luck matters more than talent.

However, none of this ‘talent’ they write about is embodied or observed in actual people, nor do they observe the amount of good or bad luck that any real people experience.

Puchino and friends build a model in which the ‘people’ are theoretical entities who do nothing. In the model they are assigned varying levels of theoretical talent by the researchers, and then they are bombarded with theoretical good or bad luck. They do not respond to what happens to them in any way. In fact, in the model, they are not allowed to make any decisions or take any actions – they are automatons. The researchers give these automatons varying levels of ‘talent’, but the same ‘wealth’ (also theoretical) to start out with, then run them through forty fictitious instances of good or bad luck. Having performed those mathematical operations, they observe how much wealth each automaton ends up with. (These forty hits of theoretical good or bad luck is what Rank refers to as a ’40-year working life span’. No one works in the model, either – good or bad things just happen to them. 40 times.)

In addition to this, there is no interaction between the various fictitious automatons. What happens to automaton no. 12 has no influence on, nor is it influenced by, what happens to any other automaton. You know, just like in the real world, where people go through their lives in perfect isolation.

I repeat, there is no actual data about anything collected or observed by these researchers. Thus, there is nothing whatsoever ‘empirical’ about this research, and I leave it to you to consider what this fictitious world of automatons might tell us about luck vs talent out in the real (empirical) world. (Note that because the automatons don’t do anything, the role of diligence, effort, or good decision-making doesn’t have even a theoretical place in this research.)

Puchino and company do discuss other research papers they say provide evidence that luck matters more than other things. These other papers are duly referenced, and the interested reader can go read them and judge for themselves how convincing any of them are. I have not done so, and there is no indication Rank has, either.

The point here is that Puchino and his colleagues provide no empirical evidence that luck matters more than talent, only that it does in their theoretical model, and Rank is wrong to say they do. Professor Rank has mis-used their research in trying to support his own view on this matter in his op-ed column. As a Professor of Social Welfare, I am not surprised that Rank believes luck matters more than talent, but there is no evidence in his article or the Puchino paper to support that view.

Sadly, academics tend to believe that any press is good press, so I doubt Puchino and friends are upset by Rank’s complete misrepresentation of their research in his article.

I was.