There's no question that hard work and talent make someone more likely to achieve economic success. But for every successful person who exhibits these qualities, there are hundreds of others who are just as talented and work just as hard, yet earn only modest incomes.
Even talent and the inclination to work hard are themselves heavily dependent on chance. In combination, genes and environment ultimately account for all important individual differences, which means that someone who was born talented and brought up to be hard-working was incredibly lucky to begin with.
This is all so straightforward as to seem completely beyond dispute. Yet luck's role in success remains oddly controversial. If you don't know where a new acquaintance stands politically, just ask him about this. If he insists luck doesn't matter, he's almost surely a staunch conservative. Liberals, even those who have achieved spectacular success in life, are for some reason far more inclined to acknowledge their good fortune.
I wrote about these issues in my most recent column in the New York Times, suggesting that many anti-tax protesters at the recent tea parties were born on third base and thought they'd hit a triple. Shortly after the column ran, I got an e-mail from a producer at the Fox Business Channel asking me to appear on Stuart Varney's show to discuss luck's role in economic success. I agreed, knowing full well that Fox hosts generally go after guests who espouse non-right-wing positions. But I was probably naive not to have expected the relentlessness of the diatribe I faced throughout the segment.
Mr. Varney, like most highly-paid conservatives, is dead certain that his own success owes nothing to luck. Didn't I realize, he asked me, what a handicap it was for someone with a British accent like his to host a television show in the United States? Actually, I didn't. The evidence, in fact, suggests otherwise. Socially disadvantageous accents tend to decay over time, but socially advantageous ones tend to get stronger. Many British expatriates actually have stronger British accents now than when they first arrived in the US.
Of course, that was just one of the many points I wish I thought of in time to mention as Mr. Varney continued to heap scorn on my position. But if you watch the segment, you'll see compelling evidence that Mr. Varney is himself extremely lucky to be earning such a high salary. You may also think I'm extremely lucky to be earning a high salary. But that's exactly my point!
Truth is we live in a turbulent world and opportunity exists in all the eddies and undercurrents of the turbulence. The ones that will succeed (both financially and otherwise) will see the opportunities created by the turbulence and take advantage of them. And usually they are so busy building and doing, they don’t have time to complain about their bad luck.
Unfortunately, the media hates these people, because their stories are boring. So we rarely hear about them. Rather we get the tea-party, 3rd-basers that gripe about all of the problems of our government. These guys make for much better TV. The result is an entitled society that blames all of their problems on bad luck or somebody else, rather than their own inability to manage their lives and risks.
There is a relevant read that HP blogger (Adlai Wertman) mentioned …Earning Serendipity by Glenn Llopis. Luck is a personal responsibility thing. It is not a left of right issue nor is it a rich or poor issue. It is about how individuals manage their personal environment so that they consistently turn life’s happenstance into positive outcomes.
A top engineer might reach an annual salary on the order of $200K. Most "professional" careers don't provide the possibility of social mobility beyond upper middle class regardless of talent.
There are particular careers that cater to the rich, and while the middle class can work their way up through these careers, entrance into the high-end vertical section of the pay scale is protected by institutional gatekeepers that generally promote from within elite social circles.
The financial industry is fighting to keep their bonuses because this is one of the few ways that anybody can make enough money to escape the middle class and join the ranks of the "working rich". The bonuses are what separates rich bankers from middle class engineers.
They hate government, and apparently believe that they themselves built the roads, schools, hospitals and communications systems that they've utilized since their birth. They also tend to help those who act, think and look like they do, and, incidentally, they believe that our nation's poor does have health care/insurance: they can go to the emergency room of their local hospital. The recent Pew poll also stated that they favor torture. Yes, I know that's religious folks the poll was referencing, but we know that they are oftentimes one in the same...
If you throw in the fact that many conservatives actually believe that comedian Colbert is one of them, it's clear that their are brain deficiencies at work here. I almost forgot...morality. When you have their leadership praising Romney and big money earners who are the leveraged buyout kings of America, ie, many (mostly white) men who have made their substantial fortunes by not creating anything, but instead by simply destroying companies with borrowed capital and putting folks out of work...these are their heroes. People who make money--the conservative's god...until they need their Jesus on the way down...
Most often it's blind ambition to the point you'd throw your mom in front of a train just to get ahead in life. Or sleep your way to the top, aka marrying your way to the top.
And let's not forget good old nepotism. Family can make you rich and famous without even breaking a sweat. Reference Paris Hilton. Name one blue collar, or even white collar, job that she has ever held in her life. You can't count the "Austrain wave" in which she recieved almost a million dollars as a "white collar job", nor the burger commercial or sex tape.
And I found myself in that same position some years ago when I was floundering for a job and my dad offered to "talk" to some people in govt to help get me a very good job with the Feds. I hated that even tho I understood why he was doing it. I've always been the type of person that if I was going to gain something, be successful, rewards, whatever, I want to be able to earn them. Without the satisfaction of knowing that I earned them on my own, they are meaningless.
He recognized that he had nothing whatsoever to do with having been born into a family of unimaginable wealth.
How "unimaginable?"
At the time he served in the United States Senate -- a very wealthy club to begin with -- it was often said that Heinz' personal fortune exceeded that of all other senators combined... estimated to be somewhere on the order of $500 billion. Yet he was not like this current crowd of "pull the ladder up behind them" Republicans. He even made national headlines by having publicly ridiculed the Reagan proposal to cut the school lunch program by classifying ketchup, mustard, and pickles as vegetables. Heinz said that was nonsense, adding: "...and I think that I know something about ketchup, mustard, and pickles!"
note: it is also said that John Heinz absolutely despised the obnoxiously arrogant son of President Reagan's vice president, though Heinz wasn't the type to have ever let something like that out publicly.