Changing the conversation about luck

Could encouraging successful people to acknowledge the role that luck has played in their lives help to challenge our collective self-delusion about living in a meritocracy?

In the mid-2010s I spent a couple of normally sunny days in early April each year in Oxford, at the Skoll World Forum. This annual gathering of mostly American philanthropists and social entrepreneurs aims to “accelerate innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems”. Many aspects of it can be, and are, justifiably criticised, not least the favouring of what Anand Giridharadas would describe as “milquetoast” solutions to problems rooted in inequality of economic and political power, and the tendency not to talk about how to address the underlying issues. As with Davos, where Rutger Bregman famously opined during a session about inequality that it was “all about taxes… all the rest is bullshit”, there’s not always a lot of soul-searching.

Having said that, these gatherings are full of impressive people doing interesting work (even if the eponymous Jeff Skoll has aligned himself squarely with Trump and Musk), and every now and then people at the Skoll World Forum say things that do at least poke a finger under the carpet to look at the structural issues. This happened at this month’s event, where the comedian Trevor Noah was taking part in a plenary session. When asked what he’d wish for, if he could wish for anything, he said:

At regular intervals, say every 17 months or so, everyone’s bank account would be randomly swapped with someone else’s. Every time I say this I can guess the rough size of my audience members’ accounts based on whether they cheer or squirm in response to this idea. But jokes aside, I imagine we’d live much differently because this shuffle would force us to grapple with how much of our lives are determined by sheer luck — depending on when and where and in which skin and to whom we are born. Too often wealthy people are praised as innovative and scrappy. A grandmother in an African village who manages to feed her entire family with so little is the most innovative and scrappy, but we rarely hear her story. It would do us all well to avoid wearing our luck as our achievements.

I reckon that most successful people, deep down, acknowledge that luck has played at least some part in their success, alongside talent and effort - even if only a minority are prepared to say as much in private, let alone in public. Most members of this group underplay the extent to which they have benefited from luck, but they're not alone in suffering from that particular cognitive bias, as we explored in our report last year, Rotten Luck.

To my mind, there may be a problem of misperception here, which feeds a collective action problem. Just as we collectively underestimate how many of us are concerned about climate breakdown and support stronger action on mitigation and adaptation, so I think we’re off the mark when it comes to assumptions about how other people think about merit and luck. We’re conditioned by a popular, media and political narrative that lionises individual success, telling rags-to-riches stories that speak to our shared yearning to live in a meritocratic society and diverting our attention from the glaringly obvious evidence that such a society is a mirage, because of the enormous structural barriers of poverty and inequality. Gaslit in this way, we assume that everyone else believes that people’s life outcomes are influenced much more by merit than by luck, even if we might harbour private doubts about this.

Of course, there’s some truth in this assumption. Many people do think this, in part because they’re influenced by the predominant narrative. But polling evidence suggests that about one in three Britons think that structural barriers are more important than individual factors in influencing life chances and outcomes, while another one in three or so are unsure. So there’s a big disconnect between the prevailing ‘meritocratic’ discourse and the views that people hold in private. And this dynamic applies to those at the top end of the wealth distribution, as well as to society in general (having more money doesn’t change people’s views very much).

This has real-world consequences. What and how we think about the role of luck in life has implications for what level of inequality we think can be justified. In particular, ignoring the role of luck in life locks in a meritocratic mindset. Inequality is excused as being the necessary by-product of a ‘fair’ society in which hard work and talent are rewarded, with stories of social mobility used to justify the status quo. And this way of thinking underplays the importance of addressing structural factors, such as dysfunctional labour and housing markets.

What if there was a way of starting to unpick this collective delusion that everyone (but especially people who have enjoyed the most material success) firmly believes that their success is due to merit, and not to luck?

Could we, for example, ask successful and high-profile people to sign a public statement acknowledging how they have benefited from luck in their life, alongside some degree of talent and hard work? We might find that people leap at the opportunity to show that they are self-aware and not totally narcissistic, especially if the branding is positive, even aspirational (something like ‘Shared Humility’). If enough people with enough clout signed up, could this start to change the conversation? Could it help us to recognise the need to reduce the role of bad luck in people’s lives, by taking action to dismantle the structural barriers to opportunity (and to the government’s opportunity mission)?

We’d need to be clear that we were talking about luck in its broader sense - including the circumstances into which people are born - and not just its narrower sense of stuff that happens to people during their lives, like winning the lottery or falling under a bus. People from privileged backgrounds are often much more comfortable talking about their reliance on ‘narrow’ luck (being in the right place at the right time when setting up a business, for example) than acknowledging that they have benefited from ‘broad’ luck (such as being born into wealth). But this is precisely the conversation that needs to change.

Stories of individual achievement against the odds are punchier and more media-friendly than stories that acknowledge nuance and people’s dependency on support structures. But, as the Patriotic Millionaires have shown, when people say things that they’re not expected to say (“we’re wealthy - tax us more”), others sit up and pay attention.

Could a collective public acknowledgement of the role of luck by some successful people help to shift the narrative? Answers on a postcard please…

The next Fair Comment will be on Wednesday 7 May, after the bank holiday, and on the same day that we launch our new report, on long-termism in UK politics, at the first of our upcoming webinars below.

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