What role does luck play in your life Barry Schwartz
Hello, everybody.
I’m honored to be here to talk to you,
and what I’m going to talk about today
is luck and justice
and the relation between them.
Some years ago,
a former student of mine called me
to talk about his daughter.
It turns out his daughter
was a high school senior,
was seriously interested
in applying to Swarthmore,
where I taught,
and he wanted to get my sense
of whether she would get in.
Swarthmore is an extremely
hard school to get into.
So I said, “Well, tell me about her.”
And he told me about her,
what her grades were like,
her board scores,
her extracurricular activities.
And she just sounded like a superstar,
wonderful, wonderful kid.
So I said, “She sounds fabulous.
She sounds like just the kind of student
that Swarthmore would love to have.”
And so he said, “Well, does that mean
that she’ll get in?”
And I said, “No.
There just aren’t enough spots
in the Swarthmore class
for everybody who’s good.
There aren’t enough spots at Harvard
or Yale or Princeton or Stanford.
There aren’t enough spots
at Google or Amazon or Apple.
There aren’t enough spots
at the TED Conference.
There are an awful lot of good people,
and some of them
are not going to make it.”
So he said, “Well, what are we
supposed to do?”
And I said, “That’s a very good question.”
What are we supposed to do?
And I know what colleges
and universities have done.
In the interest of fairness,
what they’ve done is
they’ve kept ratcheting up the standards
because it doesn’t seem fair
to admit less qualified people
and reject better qualified people,
so you just keep raising
the standards higher and higher
until they’re high enough
that you can admit
only the number of students
that you can fit.
And this violates a lot of people’s sense
of what justice and fairness is.
People in American society
have different opinions
about what it means
to say that some sort of process is just,
but I think there’s one thing
that pretty much everyone agrees on,
that in a just system, a fair system,
people get what they deserve.
And what I was telling my former student
is that when it comes
to college admissions,
it just isn’t true that people
get what they deserve.
Some people get what they deserve,
and some people don’t,
and that’s just the way it is.
When you ratchet up requirements
as colleges have done,
what you do is you create
a crazy competition
among high school kids,
because it’s not adequate to be good,
it’s not adequate to be good enough,
you have to be better than everybody else
who is also applying.
And what this has done,
or what this has contributed to,
is a kind of epidemic
of anxiety and depression
that is just crushing our teenagers.
We are wrecking a generation
with this kind of competition.
As I was thinking about this,
it occurred to me
there’s a way to fix this problem.
And here’s what we could do:
when people apply to college,
we distinguish between the applicants
who are good enough to be successful
and the ones who aren’t,
and we reject the ones who aren’t
good enough to be successful,
and then we take all of the others,
and we put their names in a hat,
and we just pick them out at random
and admit them.
In other words, we do
college admissions by lottery,
and maybe we do job offers
at tech companies by lottery,
and – perish the thought –
maybe we even make decisions
about who gets invited to talk at TED
by lottery.
Now, don’t misunderstand me,
a lottery like this is not
going to eliminate the injustice.
There will still be plenty of people
who don’t get what they deserve.
But at least it’s honest.
It reveals the injustice for what it is
instead of pretending otherwise,
and it punctures the incredible
pressure balloon
that our high school kids
are now living under.
So why is it that this perfectly
reasonable proposal,
if I do say so myself,
doesn’t get any serious discussion?
I think I know why.
I think it’s that we hate the idea
that really important things in life
might happen by luck or by chance,
that really important things in our lives
are not under our control.
I hate that idea.
It’s not surprising
that people hate that idea,
but it simply is the way things are.
First of all, college admissions
already is a lottery.
It’s just that the admissions officers
pretend that it isn’t.
So let’s be honest about it.
And second,
I think if we appreciated
that it was a lottery,
it would also get us to acknowledge
the importance of good fortune
in almost every one of our lives.
Take me.
Almost all the most significant
events in my life have occurred,
to a large degree,
as a result of good luck.
When I was in seventh grade,
my family left New York
and went to Westchester County.
Right at the beginning of school,
I met a lovely young girl
who became my friend,
then she became my best friend,
then she became my girlfriend
and then she became my wife.
Happily, she’s been my wife now
for 52 years.
I had very little to do with this.
This was a lucky accident.
I went off to college,
and in my first semester, I signed up
for a class in introduction to psychology.
I didn’t even know what psychology was,
but it fit into my schedule
and it met requirements,
so I took it.
And by luck, the class was taught
by a superstar introductory
psychology teacher, a legend.
Because of that, I became
a psychology major.
Went off to graduate school.
I was finishing up.
A friend of mine who taught
at Swarthmore decided
he didn’t want to be a professor anymore,
and so he quit to go to medical school.
The job that he occupied opened up,
I applied for it, I got it,
the only job I’ve ever applied for.
I spent 45 years teaching at Swarthmore,
an institution that had an enormous impact
on the shape that my career took.
And to just give one last example,
I was giving a talk about
some of my work in New York,
and there was somebody in the audience
who came up to me after my talk.
He introduced himself.
He said, “My name is Chris.
Would you like to give a talk at TED?”
And my response was, “What’s TED?”
Well, I mean, he told me,
and TED then wasn’t what it is now.
But in the intervening years,
the talks I’ve given at TED
have been watched
by more than 20 million people.
So the conclusion is, I’m a lucky man.
I’m lucky about my marriage.
I’m lucky about my education.
I’m lucky about my career.
And I’m lucky to have had a platform
and a voice at something like TED.
Did I deserve the success I’ve had?
Sure I deserve that success,
just as you probably deserve your success.
But lots of people also deserve
successes like ours
who haven’t had it.
So do people get what they deserve?
Is society just?
Of course not.
Working hard and playing by the rules
is just no guarantee of anything.
If we appreciate the inevitability
of this kind of injustice
and the centrality of good fortune,
we might ask ourselves
what responsibilities do we have
to the people we are now celebrating
as heroes in this time of the pandemic
when a serious illness
befalls their family
to make sure that they remain whole
and their lives aren’t ruined
by the cost of dealing with the illness?
What do we owe people who struggle,
work hard and are less lucky than we are?
About a half century ago,
the philosopher John Rawls wrote a book
called “A Theory of Justice,”
and in that book, he introduced a concept
that he called “the veil of ignorance.”
The question he posed was:
If you didn’t know what your position
in society was going to be,
what kind of a society
would you want to create?
And what he suggested
is that when we don’t know
whether we’re going to enter society
at the top or at the bottom,
what we want is a society
that is pretty damn equal,
so that even the unlucky
will be able to live decent,
meaningful and satisfying lives.
So bring this back, all of you lucky,
successful people, to your communities,
and do what you can to make sure
that we honor and take care of
people who are just as deserving
of success as we are,
but just not as lucky.
Thank you.