The idol of randomness wants to steal your wealth

If you’re reading this post, I assume you have built some wealth and are wondering how to keep it and possibly make it grow. You should know that many people claim you have no right to that wealth because you didn’t earn it. You got it by luck, like a lottery winner.

Alexander Green, Chief Investment Strategist at the Oxford Club, wrote a great post recently on the topic, “Is Business and investment success due to skill...or luck?” The post issued from a debate he had with a New York Times columnist, Robert Frank, author of the book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.

Frank wrote in his book that “If you have been so economically successful that your income and net worth put you in the top 1% or 2% in the country, the deciding factor was not talent, education, hard work, risk-taking, persistence, resilience or all of the above...It was luck, plain and simple.” Frank is clever to assault only the top 2% of wealthy. They have no friends and attacking them will excite envy in the rest. 

Socialists stuck on luck

In May of this year The Atlantic offered another hymn to the goddess of luck. Not only is worshiping the goddess a good thing according to the author, but agnostics are stingy and selfish:

Seeing ourselves as self-made leads us to be less generous and public-spirited...

A recent study by the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright found that the top 1 percent of U.S. wealth-holders are “extremely active politically” and are much more likely than the rest of the American public to resist taxation, regulation, and government spending. Given that the wealthiest Americans believe their prosperity is due, above all else, to their own talent and hard work, is this any wonder? Surely it’s a short hop from overlooking luck’s role in success to feeling entitled to keep the lion’s share of your income—and to being reluctant to sustain the public investments that let you succeed in the first place.

Traditionally, religion explained what we couldn’t understand. Today, it’s randomness. Choosing randomness, or luck, is a description, not an explanation of a phenomenon, and an admission of ignorance. There are quite a few books promoting the goddess of luck. Keynes blamed recession on the “animal spirits” of businessmen, an allusion to randomness and not pagan beliefs. Nassim Taleb’s books on black swans was my first introduction to her. Then I read Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street: A Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing. Recently, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow came out.