Luck is more important to success

“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get that on your own,” President Obama declared years ago at a campaign rally. “If you’re successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.” In America, the belief that hard work and a touch of grit is all one needs to succeed. Talent and drive can take you a long way, but it’s often not enough. Luck is as important.

• Most Americans underestimate the role of luck in economic success.
• The current American tendency is to overlook the role of luck as a cultural bias and Americans are less likely than Europeans to favor high taxes on the rich and generous benefits for the poor.
• Conservatives have a narrative about success, which prioritizes hard work and skill. Liberals have an alternative narrative about success, which prioritizes structural constraints and privilege. Neither one is entirely right, but it does seem that liberals are closer to the truth.
• People who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But it is also true that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. 
• Chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine.
• The rich underestimate the importance of luck in success and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.
• In this world dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones and enormous income differences over time. 
• Luck is as important as hard work in becoming successful.
• Fortune favors the fortunate. And not acknowledging that can have unlucky consequences.
• People who succeed on a grand scale tend to believe they did it all by themselves. They think that whatever dollars came their way are theirs to keep. If the government tries to tax it, they regard it as theft. 
• Believing that all the good fortune that came your way was earned in the traditional sense is a very difficult claim to sustain once you look at how the competitions unfold and the role chance events play in all our lives.
• Ethically speaking, we have no control over the most important determinants of our lives. Even if you think you succeeded purely on the basis of talent and effort, where do you think you got your talent? Where do you think that inclination to work hard comes from? These are things determined by genes and upbringing and it's quite ludicrous to claim moral credit for them.
• Privilege has a way of blinding the privileged. People born into good fortune can’t appreciate how much of their success stems from the care and attention and resources they received at every stage of their development.
• You're probably not going to succeed if you don't get really good at work and effort. You shouldn't expect and wait with hope that lightning strikes. Tell people to try to deserve whatever it is that they want. That doesn't mean you'll get it, but you're certainly not going to get it if you don't deserve it.
• We really need to make the investments where the environment is conducive for talented and hard-working chances of succeeding. In America it was always true that if you work hard and are good, you may not be a spectacular success, but you'd most likely prosper to a reasonable degree.
• Rich people could pay more taxes and scarcely feel it, but nobody thinks about it that way.

Markets are not perfectly meritocratic. They're more meritocratic now than ever before in the past. Privilege always matters. Most of the people who emerge as big winners today do tend to be talented and hard-working, so there's at least a semblance of meritocracy. What's also true is that being hard-working and talented are by no means sufficient to get you into the winner's circle. Luck matters a great deal.

Luck is far more important to success in this life than we imagine.
 Things we're not entitled to claim moral credit for are the driving forces 
behind success ... Robert H. Frank

Read the source article

Modinomics and its Incoherence

Modinomics are the economic policies of India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. His followers or voters believe that Modinomics is a much-needed panacea to India’s economy. Unfortunately, there is no coherent difference between Modinomics and other “socialist” policies. Devotees of Modinomics believe, “lesser evil is better than bigger evil”, whereas liberals believe that Modinomics doesn’t make social-economic sense. There is no difference between both sides because their virtual goal is to maximize state power and social demagogy in a euphemistic way, at the cost of personal freedom, individual volition and cultural liberty.

• Modinomics is an immoral economic approach to individual freedom and socio-economic libertarianism.
• The established narration is socialism (government owning the resources, controlling, regulating and manipulating the means), which is totally against the hyperbole of free market capitalism.
• The Indian economy led by PM Modi and his “expert” team is consciously ignorant of economics.
• The matrix of Modinomics is again hopelessly inured and infatuated with etatism or statism.
• It is said that PM Modi is a pragmatic modernizer of “government running the economy”, but in reality his government failed to minimize the government’s role. His favorite rhetoric “minimum government, maximum governance” convinced the ultracrepidarian class, youngsters and global investors, but the result is “maximum government, minimum liberty”.
• Although his government has taken grim steps to outlaw the unnecessary laws, bureaucratic instruments and interventionists, Modinomics is still an old wine in a new bottle. His government is still run by the economics of “moral hazard” policies, “too big to fail” mechanisms, albeit his government iterates “recapitalization of public units” dialogue. 
• His followers strongly hold the opinion regarding his Fabian way of enriching the economy but their forgiving-forgetting attitude doesn’t distort the truth of economics.
• Modinomics, unlike the previous system of governance, suffers from ‘Emporiophobia’ (fear of free market),‘Aurophobia’ (fear of gold savings) and ‘Apoplithorismosphobia’ (fear of deflation). 
• Considering his government’s ‘selective silence’ on major economic issues like property rights, civil liberty, secessionism, economic expropriation, indirect taxation, capital structure, border trading, etc., it is right to ratiocinate that his government is a turban-less Keynesian. 
• Modinomics, along with the economic system of India and its paid politicians, still repeats high-sounding terms like “freedom of the investors” and “stable growth” which sedates the madding crowd. The terms “private” and “freedom” no longer mean what they are. They are cruel deceptions that fool the mind yearning for human freedom. 
• The fact is that in India we still have massive regulations and regimentations. This is necessary, we are told, because it is “in the public interest.” Terms like “public interest” and “common good” are code words that mean police state and reduced liberty. How has Modinomics liberated the Indian economy?
• With this reverse propaganda, the opposition has been neutralized. True words, true meanings of patriotism (example: bolo “Bharat Mata ki Jai”) and freedom have become the farce and illusion that cover fascism. 
• PM Modi has attracted the millennials in droves, based on the lie that “UPA’s socialism is immoral but his brand of socialism is moral” because it guarantees “liberty of opportunity”. 
• Modinomics is also embedded with obscure ideas when it comes to deciphering trickle-down economics, social spending and international economy. 
• His government voices out that the Indian economy would balance between growth and development but fails to understand that growth and development are conventional and outdated concepts, in the current changing environment. Neither growth nor development improves the real essence of economic liberty. In fact, they both crush the schema of economic freedom.
• Catallaxy, market voluntarism and property rights can be considered as sound solution(s) to counter the fascism of Modinomics and ‘Sickularism’. As long as Modinomics doesn’t divorce its romance with/from eminent domain, public monopoly and crony capitalism, it would stand indifferent in this whole paradigm. 
• The time has come to apply deductive reasoning against such economic philosophies advocated by the politicians than falling for rhetoric et al. Simply put: “Modinomics rewards sloth and penalizes hard work while Voluntarism rewards hard work and penalizes sloth.”

 

Read the original article - June 2016