Why We Work with Barry Schwartz - Opportunity, Good Fortune, and Happiness

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I'm kind of overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed by the generosity of the college to make this possible,
I'm overwhelmed by the generosity of my colleagues, especially Andrew and Katherine,
who must have essentially had a whole other job. When this started it was kind of like
the Mickey Rooney movie Let's Get Together and Put On A Play, and the presumption was
in five minutes we would have the product and that turned out not to be quite true.
And no matter what burden arose, no matter what obstacle appeared, they found ways to
solve every problem with great cheer and good grace to make this day possible, and I really
just can't put into words what it has meant to me. In addition, it has been a Rashomon-like
day, do you all know what I'm referring to? Even those of you who haven't started shaving
yet? So Rashomon is this movie about different people who all witness the same scene, and
see very different scenes. Well what I have heard today depicted is pieces of my life
that I find close to unrecognizable, because even though they all happened, my interpretation
of them is dramatically different from the interpretations that you have been given.
You've been given the impression from everybody that I somehow had this incredible influence
on the work and life of the people with whom I have collaborated. I've been the teacher.
My own take on these collaborations, and I mean this with complete sincerity, is exactly
the reverse. All I can see in these interactions is the ways in which each of these people
have taught me things that I didn't already know. I came to Swarthmore remarkably ignorant,
although I didn't think I was, and the interactions I've had with colleagues, many of whom you've
heard, have educated me. And I feel like I have learned a lot more from them than I've
taught them, so I think basically they've been telling you a lie, and I'm going to try
to sort of straighten that out. But actually, occasions like this encourage people to look
back, nostalgia is a nice thing if indulged in in extremely small doses, sort of like
hallucinogens, so I think I have permission to indulge a little bit of nostalgia. But
I'm going to do it because I want to make a point. I don't have a low opinion of myself,
I really don't, but as I look back on the most impactful, formative, meaningful, and
rewarding experiences of my career, almost all of them without exception were the result
of extraordinary good fortune. I made the most of my opportunities, but I had little
or nothing to do with creating any of those opportunities. They smacked me in the face,
and I take credit for recognizing that they were opportunities, but not for creating the
conditions that made those opportunities possible. It's apparent to me that - I teach classes
in decision-making, where ostensibly part of the point is to teach people how to make
good decisions, and wisdom, which essentially, part of the point of which is to teach people
how to make good decisions, but it's apparent to me that virtually none of the important
decisions that I have made in my life conform to any idea at all about what is rational
or what is wise. And I'm going to sort of give you a quick summary of why that's true,
and then try to connect it to something that I think is actually more significant than
just my idiosyncratic history. I moved to Yonkers from the Bronx in the 7th grade, Yonkers is
just north of the Bronx, the Bronx is just north of Manhattan, which is where I thought
civilization began. I thought it ended in Brooklyn, apparently that's changed. So I
moved in 7th grade and almost immediately I met Myrna, you have heard Myrna mentioned
several times, many of you know her, not all of you do, I would like it if Myrna and also
our older daughter Alison and our oldest granddaughter Ruby stood up and face the crowd. They differ
principally on the basis of age and height. So I met Myrna almost immediately and she
essentially immediately became my best friend. Then she became my girlfriend, which took
a lot of work on my part, and then she became my wife and the mother of my children. She's
always been my toughest and my most sympathetic critic. Every time I give her something to
read, her aim is to find a way to help me make it better, to find a way to help me say
what she know's I'm trying to say, that the first pass hasn't been eloquent enough to
make clear, and this is true even when she disagrees with me. Sometimes. So she's always
been my sounding board with the exception of this talk. And that actually scares the
crap out of me. So anyway, she became my best friend and the question is why? Was it because
I was a rational decision maker? Did I see how intelligent she was? Did I see how empathetic
she was? Did I see how kind she was? Did I see the fierce moral core that kind of defined
her existence in the world? The answer is no. No to all of those things. I was attracted
to her, this is the God's honest truth, because she was the first girl I had ever met who
loved baseball. And more specifically, loved the New York Yankees. So, the one marriage
that everyone is bragging about, that I have had - and, you know, I'm willing to take credit,
that's a real achievement - but I had it because she liked the damn Yankees, she liked Mickey
Mantle. What kind of reason is that to form a life partnership? So we went through school
together and I applied to college, I applied to six colleges, I assure you I applied on
the basis of zero information. The school I was dying to go to was Columbia because
I went to a gathering of high school newspaper editors there and completely fell in love,
it was my romantic image of what a college should be, I knew nothing about what it was
actually like to be a student there. I applied to six colleges, and I got into one. It's
true. The only place that took me was NYU, which had a little Swarthmore-like campus
in the Bronx, and so I cleverly decided to go. I'm willing to take a fair amount of credit
for that decision. So I took psychology as a freshman, and I didn't have any idea what
psychology was. I don't even mean that I thought psychology was Freud. If I had known that
much, I would have been sophisticated. I knew nothing about what psychology was. It fit
into my schedule. I know that no Swarthmore student would ever choose a course for that
reason. So anyway, my Psych 1 teacher was a guy named Phil Zimbardo, you've heard his
name mentioned already once. Those of you who don't know about him, he's a legendary
Psych 1 teacher, probably a third of the students he taught ended up wanting to do something
connected to psychology, and he completely captivated me. And so I went from being a
complete ignoramus about psychology to being a huge fan of psychology, but that wasn't
enough. My aspiration still was to be a writer. And I took another course that used to be
required, Freshman English Composition, which was designed to teach you how to write, and
the first papers I turned in in this course I got Ds. This is sort of the drill, they
give you low grades at the beginning to basically humiliate you so that you think you actually
still have something to learn, and gradually your grades go up even if your writing doesn't
get any better. But I didn't know that, so what did I learn? I learned psychology is
incredibly exciting and I don't have what it takes to be a writer. And if I hadn't had
both of those experiences, the odds are pretty good I would not have pursued psychology.
So I don't think I deserve a whole lot of credit for that. These were the circumstances
that confronted me. So I started taking psychology and Zimbardo's not the only star. There's
another star in the department, some of you may be familiar with him, his name is Alan
Schneider. He taught me psychology. He taught Myrna psychology. Myrna spent two years working
in his lab, and then we recruited him to come to Swarthmore when the NYU campus that he
taught at, and I studied at, closed. So that's how I became a psychology major. Time came
to go to graduate school, I only applied to two, and I had no interest in one of them.
So I got into the other one, and I went to the other one, and it happened to be Penn.
I chose Penn for the wrong reasons. I won't tell you what the reasons were because I don't
want to insult people, but I chose Penn on the basis of bad reasons but it turned out
it was a spectacularly good decision. Because of the unbelievably vibrant, alive, big question-oriented
atmosphere that was present there when I started. Psychology was in a period of turmoil in the
late '60s and early '70s, there were these received truths that psychologists thought
they understood and all of them were being turned upside down and everyone there was
open to changing their view of what was important, what was interesting, and what knowledge counted
as. This was a tiny window of time. Psychology was closed-minded before, psychology has become
awfully closed-minded after, but in the period in the early 1970s it seemed as though everything
was possible. And I happened to be at the most intellectually engaged institution in
the country at exactly the moment when the people there were as intellectually engaged
as it was possible to be. None of this had anything to do with any rational decision
I made. I was smart enough to appreciate it, I was certainly not smart enough to make it
happen. Nonetheless, even though Penn was exciting, I was doing this ridiculous work
teaching pigeons how to do stuff in little boxes. And for those of you who aren't aware
of it, the world was falling apart in the 1960s, or at least it seemed to be, and there
was some hope that the next world would be a lot better, and I decided that I was really
doing something that was essentially akin to intellectual masturbation when I could
be out there doing something that improved the world. So I decided to go to law school.
And I talked to the folks at Penn about starting law school part-time while I finished my Ph.D.,
and at the end of two year's I'd have a year's worth of law school and I'd have my Ph.D.
done, but the plan was to get a law degree and then go defend political radicals from
oppression by the police and other oppressive agents of the state. That was the plan. But
Penn said, "full-time or nothing," and so I said to myself, "all right, I will rush
and finish my Ph.D. and then start law school full time." And that's what I did and that
was the plan and in that year, as has been mentioned, I TA'd in a Psych 1 class taught
by Marty Seligman. And I discovered something that I had been completely oblivious to while
being in graduate school, which is that a significant part of what one can do as an
academic is teaching. And even if putting animals in boxes is frivolous beyond belief,
teaching students is anything but frivolous. And it transformed my aspirations for myself
when I appreciated that I could conceivably have some hand in changing the world by continuing
on the path that I was on. I wish I could say that I knew in advance that this was possible.
I didn't, it was an accidental discovery that I was clever enough to appreciate when it
smacked me in the face. But my good fortune doesn't end there. Myrna was a graduate student
a little bit behind me in progress, we were going to have the two-body problem if I applied
for jobs. And it turned out that a good friend of mine named Joe Bernheim, who taught at
Swarthmore College, decided that he also couldn't stand spending his life putting animals in
boxes and watching them do silly things for food, so he quit to go to medical school.
He quit Swarthmore to go to medical school, and the job opened up. When did the job open
up? Exactly when I was ready to apply for it. And so I applied for the job. Did I think
it was the best possible job? I didn't think. What I kind of thought was "it is a good enough
job. Swarthmore is a good place." I knew that it was a good place, it was such a good place
that I didn't apply because I knew I would never get in. So I applied for this job and
only this job and I got it. And so it is true not only that this is the only job I've ever
had, it's the only job I have ever applied for. And that probably makes me close to unique.
So it was only several years after I was there that I discovered, not that Swarthmore was
a good gig, but that for me it was the perfect gig. It was the perfect job, it was the job
designed with me in mind. I sure as hell didn't know this in advance, but I was clever enough
to see it when it became apparent to me. I, as you've heard various people exaggerate,
I'm a lover of ideas, I'm more an experimental philosopher than I am an experimental psychologist,
as my colleagues in the psychology department will almost certainly tell you. And Swarthmore
not only allowed that, it encouraged it. It encouraged me to talk, to operate, at a level
of idea and abstraction and not only at a level of empirical laboratory detail. So I
was able to cultivate what was, for me, the natural and fulfilling approach to studying
the things that I was interested in. There's virtually no place else in the country that
I could have done this kind of work in this kind of way without paying a very significant
price. At Swarthmore, not only do you not pay a price, you actually get all kinds of
accolades showered on you for seeing the big, as opposed to the small, picture. But in addition,
as Schuldenfrei told you earlier, I was teaching a class on Skinner and Schuldenfrei was teaching
a class on Skinner, mine was actually based on what Skinner actually said, Schuldenfrei's
was based on what Skinner would have said if Skinner had been a little bit more consistent
and self-aware than he was. But there were these two students, these two wonderful, interested,
and interesting students, Kathy Purcell and Nancy Sato and they were taking both of our
classes and they would go to his class and hear X, and they would go to my class and
hear not X, and then they'd go to his class and hear Y, and they'd go to mine and hear
not Y, and they couldn't stand it anymore. And they finally said "listen, you two have
to talk to each other." And we did. And it began a conversation that's now 45 years old.
It has been thrilling all the way through, and occasionally not only thrilling but also
productive. I think that - I don't mean this facetiously - I think that the sort of deep
approach that I have taken to my work in the last 35 years is more influenced by the interactions
that I've had with Richie and Hugh Lacey than pretty much anything else. Ken Sharpe described
some of this in detail and so did Hazel Markus. The idea that human nature is something that
is shaped, not essential, came out of my interactions with Schuldenfrei and Lacey, and they got
it largely from their reading of Marx. So it transformed my life to be able to work
with these people but it happened only because there were two aggressive, interested, and
interesting students who demanded that we leave our damn offices once in awhile and
talk to one another. Several years later I was on sabbatical at Harvard, and I was taking
classes in economics, and evolutionary biology, and my plan was just to teach a course in
this stuff. That was my only plan, I had no grander aspirations. And Dan Reisberg, who
you've heard from this morning, invited me to give a talk at the New School. I'm sure
Dan doesn't remember this - maybe Dan does. And I decided that instead of giving my usual
talk about pigeons and boxes, I would actually sit down and think about what I'd been studying
this year and give a talk about the relation between economics, psychology, and evolutionary
biology. So I started sort of organizing my notes, and when I was done, it was a hundred
and fifty pages long. So I did not give a hundred-and-fifty-page colloquium, but I did
decide maybe this should be a book. It had never occurred to me to write a book on this,
but I had basically written two-thirds of a book, so I submitted it to my publisher
and that became The Battle for Human Nature. It was certainly not anything I designed and
once again I was clever enough to recognize the opportunity when it smacked me in the
face. It was the first real book I write. I don't count textbooks as books. Marty Seligman
invited me to this gathering of young and less-young people to launch positive psychology
in Mexico, and we took turns talking about some of the things we were working on, and
I gave a talk about choice and the downside of too much choice. And Marty made a casual
remark that I'm sure he doesn't remember having made. He said, "I'll bet that's not true of
everybody." It had never occurred to me to ask myself that question. It launched what
became the research that Andrew and John and Sonya and Darren and I did, identifying people
who want the best versus people who want "good enough," and making the argument that the
choice problem is really only a problem for people who have these absurdly high standards
and always need to get the best out of every decision. A casual remark made by Marty is what launched
that whole line of work. I didn't plan it. I didn't engineer it. I didn't rationally
construct it. All I did was take advantage of a good idea when somebody smacked me in
the face with it. So that's how my life has gone. I gave a talk about this work at some
small conference in New York, a guy came up to me afterwards and said "I run a conference
called TED, would you like to come and talk at TED?" And I said, "What's TED?" And he
told me what it was, and I said "what the Hell, that sounds like fun," so I went and
gave a talk and nobody knew what it was back then. And then a few months later they launched
this website, and YouTube got born, and all of a sudden everybody on the planet has seen
me wearing embarrassing shorts and a T-shirt. By the way, I just want to - this is a digression
- I was invited back a few years later to give a talk on wisdom, and this time everybody
knew what TED was, including me. And Myrna, bless her heart, gave me one piece of advice,
and that was "don't you dare go there looking the way you did the last time." So I actually
went there looking more like this. You don't know what kind of effort it takes for me to
dress like this. And so I gave my talk, and afterwards, I don't know, twenty-five people
came up to me and said "I was so disappointed you weren't wearing shorts!" They thought
this was a kind of right-on, power-to-the-people statement. I guess one of the things it shows
you is that you can't win. So, you know, my life has really been one fortunate opportunity
after another. People who have known me for a long time, if you ask them, I think that
if they are being honest with themselves they will tell you that the brief narrative I have
given you is really the truth. I'm not trying to be falsely modest, I have been incredibly
lucky and smart enough to take advantage of good luck when it has come my way. And this
has made me an extremely happy person. And it's made me an extremely happy person for
reasons that some of you might not appreciate. And that is - there's a wonderful paper that
was published about three years ago, asking what happiness means at different points in
history and in different cultures. And the astonishing finding, it certainly astonished
me, is that historically, happiness means good fortune. It doesn't mean that it is the
emotional response to having good fortune, it means good fortune itself. A happy person
is a lucky person. You understand the difference, it's not "lucky people are happy," it is "what
it means to be happy is that you're lucky." This was the dominant definition pretty much
everywhere and what's happened in recent times is that in cultures like ours, this definition
has obviously been replaced by one that is very agentic, one that focuses entirely on
sort of subjective understanding of what it feels like to be you, and not what the objective
circumstances of your life have been. But even now, in dictionaries that capture the
language of many countries, you still see happiness as good luck as a secondary or,
at worst, tertiary definition. And in some countries it is still the primary definition.
And so I'm a happy person in the sense that I have been the beneficiary of an enormous
amount of good fortune. I'm also a happy person in the sense that I appreciate that and I
tend to walk around most of the time with a smile on my face. So that's my history,
but I'm not telling you my history just because it's what you're supposed to do on an occasion
like this, I'm telling you this because I wanted to make a point. And my point is that
I want to talk to you a little bit about justice. Somebody has already alluded to this idea,
too, but, I'm sorry, you're going to hear it again. What do we mean by justice? This
has been studied. This is not the philosopher's question, "what should one mean by justice?"
It is "what do ordinary people mean by justice when you ask ordinary people what they think
justice means?" And ordinary people think justice means equity. In studies done tapping
the sense of justice in well over a hundred thousand people, they think that justice is
equity. Does that tell you what justice means? Do you know what that means, that justice
is equity? It doesn't tell me enough. This is true of liberals, it's true of conservatives.
It doesn't seem to distinguish on the basis of political orientation. But what does "equity"
mean? I think equity means these two sentences: that people should deserve what they get,
and that people should get what they deserve. Equity is when you deserve the good things
that come to you, and when you get the good things that your activity in the world warrants.
This is not saying much more than that - when we say that people should deserve what they
get, we're saying that success in life should be meritocratic, we should earn our successes. It shouldn't
be who you know that determines success, but what you know and what you do. It's unjust
to get good seats at a concert because your brother-in-law is a concert promoter, although
you'll probably take them. It's unjust to get into Yale because your mother is an alum
or your grandfather made a big contribution. It's unjust to get a government contract because
you made a big donation in an electoral campaign or because your best friend's the guy who
awards the contract. This standard of justice is kind of a no-brainer. It's hard even to
imagine a justification for violations of this standard. Of course the world doesn't
work this way, but this sentence is kind of a useful guide when we seek to make whatever
system we work in a little more just. Can we make this sentence a little more true?
It guides us to identify what's wrong, and to come up with procedures to correct the
injustices. What about the second sentence? Should people get what they deserve? There
are a lot of concerns these days about economic inequality in the US, and partly what people
are talking about is folks who have done the right thing - the expression you hear again
and again is these are people who have quote "worked hard and played by the rules," only
to fall further and further behind. So this is a complaint that people are not getting
what they deserve. The problem with this second sentence is that it establishes a standard
of justice that simply can't be achieved. Not - students, close your ears - not every
well-trained computer engineer will get a job at Microsoft, Google, or Facebook. Not
every high-achieving high school senior will get into Harvard, Princeton, or Swarthmore.
There is just not enough room at the top. So justice, in this sense, is not possible.
So I've spent a fair amount of time, for various reasons, thinking about the justice and equity
associated with college admissions, as you've heard. So how do we do, when it comes to college
admissions? It is true of Harvard and Princeton and Swarthmore, I think, that mostly, people
deserve what they get. With a few caveats, like legacy admissions, I think it's true
that people who get into these places deserve to get into these places. I think the careful
screening that comes when you can admit less than ten percent of the already self-selected
group who apply almost guarantees that every student you admit will merit admission. So
we have solved that problem. But does everyone get what they deserve? Well, you know the
answer to that as well as I do. Those of you who are walking around with little T-shirts
in your heads that say "Swarthmore, but my first choice was Yale" know that not everyone
can get what they deserve. A portion of the applicants to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton,
Yale, Amherst, and Swarthmore probably lack the qualifications to be admitted, but many
applicants, probably the majority of applicants, do deserve to be admitted. It's unjust that
- is it unjust that so many qualified applicants don't get in? Yes it is. But what the Hell
is a school supposed to do? What ends up happening, as you all know, is that the standards for
admission keep ratcheting up in an effort to be fair to the applicants, and, at the
same time, to keep institutions from exploding in size. Under these conditions, what it means
to deserve to get into Swarthmore is no longer that you're an excellent student, but that
you are a more excellent student than the competition. Admissions officers have the
unenviable task of making distinctions among candidates where no real distinctions exist.
In doing so, they preserve the veneer of justice in college admissions. My good friend Schuldenfrei
once interviewed an applicant to the college as a favor to a friend - I think usually you
stay out of admissions stuff - and was incredibly impressed with this young person, and sent
the dean of admissions a note saying what a wonderful person this was, and this student
did not get in. And Schuldenfrei, curious, sent a note saying "how come?" And the dean
of admissions said, quote, "no reason." And Schuldenfrei said, quote, "what do you mean,
'no reason?'" I did the accent as best I could. What the dean of admissions said is "look,
there is no reason to take this person and not this person, we're trying to make distinctions
that are not makeable. We do the best we can." And I think they do do the best they can.
(offstage) He also told me not to tell anybody. So the good news is that this was thirty-one
years ago, so it's no longer relevant, and you didn't tell anybody. You just told me.
And, as I think you know, and as I think is becoming clear in more and more affluent,
privileged communities around the country, this escalation of admissions standards has
not been benign. It induces students or their parents to try to game the system. Taking
and re-taking SATs, spending a fortune on SAT prep classes, having pros edit college
essays, signing up for extracurricular activities that they have no interest in. All told an
enormous commitment of resources in money, time, and effort, for no purpose other than
to get into these select schools. Admissions officers are confident that they can see through
these ruses, and no doubt they sometimes can. But I think they will be fooled much more
often than they think. So these are the practices that get encouraged - I can't give a talk
without cartoons. So this is a real problem, we seem to be stuck, how else can we pursue
justice except by raising standards? I think there is a way. You've already heard it mentioned
and people who have been in my classes have heard me talk about it until they're absolutely
nauseous at the thought of hearing about it again, too bad for you. I've been arguing
for this for a decade, nobody, nobody, nobody takes me seriously. The solution to this problem
is a lottery. Every applicant who is good enough, a standard that will vary from school
to school, gets his or her name put into a hat, and then the winners are chosen at random.
If selective schools were honest about what it takes for a student to succeed, they will
have standards of "good enough" that are high, but not unreasonable. And if they use a lottery,
the pressure balloon that is engulfing high school kids and destroying them will be punctured
just like that. Instead of having to be better than anyone else in Palo Alto, all they will
have to be is good enough and lucky. Anyone who is good enough gets her name thrown into
the hat, and has the same chance of admission as anyone else with a name in the hat. This
is the right thing to do, both because we really need to relieve pressure on high-achieving
students and because it is a fairer representation of what the admissions process actually currently
is. There is a principle called "the principle of the flat maximum." We are at a region of
the distribution - and places like Swarthmore and Yale and Princeton and so on - we are
at a region of the distribution, way at the right tip of the distribution, where the differences
among the people being measured are smaller than the errors in the tools that are being
used to measure. And as long as that's true, it is in effect a lottery, whether you try
to convince yourself otherwise or not. If you made it a lottery, people wouldn't beat
themselves up so much for not getting in, and they wouldn't drive themselves crazy trying
to figure out what little extra edge they could negotiate in competition with their
peers. A lottery like this won't correct the injustice that is inherent in a pyramidal
system in which not everyone can rise to the top, and nothing will, but here's what I think
it will do. It will reveal this injustice for what it is, instead of pretending otherwise.
Arguably, it will be more just than the current system, since people with financial resources
are much more likely to try to game the system and succeed, in the current system, than people
without resources. And the data that I see suggest that the income inequality among students
at institutions like this is much worse than the income inequality across the nation as
a whole. Selective institutions magnify income inequality rather than reducing it, despite
what we say our intentions are. Under a lottery, reasons to game the system would largely evaporate.
Will this decrease the quality of the students we teach? Actually, I think not. The dean
of admissions at Harvard was once quoted as saying about twelve or so years ago that if
they went through standard admissions and they took all the people they admitted and
threw them out and then started again, nobody who teaches the students at Harvard would
have any idea that they had done that. That there's no real difference between the top
batch of students and the second tier of students. A case can be made that a lottery would improve
the quality of students, and this speaks to the point that Amy made in her talk. When
we instrumentalize what students do in high school, it makes them worse students. A lottery
will make the instrumentalization of high school education much less significant than
it currently is. And this will probably mean students cultivate their interests and passions
to a much greater degree, and as a result are more interesting and better students than
the kind we're getting now, although I have no complaints about them. So why is it that
nobody takes this blatantly obviously good idea seriously? My guess about why is that
people think it is unjust for really important life outcomes to be decided by chance. No
matter how high the standards get, people can enter the process convinced that applicants
will get what they deserve. Who wants your future determined by a roll of the dice? I
understand this sentiment, but I think it is doubly mistaken. It's mistaken because,
despite what admissions people think and say, admissions already is determined by a roll
of the dice, or worse, by system gaming. And it's mistaken because I think a lottery will
force people to acknowledge the importance of good fortune in virtually all life outcomes.
The reason that I did this embarrassing description of my own life was to try to convince you
that good fortune is a significant piece of the story of success and failure in almost
all of our lives, I just chose myself as an example since I seem to be the principal topic
of conversation today. But this notion that it's all meritocracy leads people to believe
that nothing is a matter of chance, everything is earned, and this leads people to be remarkably
unsympathetic to other people in society who have not succeeded. If my success is because
of my effort and achievement, their failure must be because of their lack of effort and
their lack of achievement. So what ends up happening is you create a society - and this
also speaks to Hazel's point earlier - you create a society that is almost devoid of
empathy and devoid of perspective-taking, a society of people who think "since everybody
gets what they deserve, my success is deserved, why should I worry at all about the people
who have failed? Their failure is also deserved." I think admitting the importance of good fortune
might encourage institutions themselves to be more explicit about the importance of things
like empathy, compassion, and stuff, and worry a little bit less about where they rank in
the U.S. News and World Report, and a little bit more about where they rank when it comes
to nurturing good people. And what applies to academic success applies to success more
generally. Does everybody deserve what they get? No. But I think actually in a competitive
world economy, more people who succeed who deserve to succeed than used to be true. I
think the world is actually getting better in that regard. But, does everybody get what
they deserve? No, absolutely, unequivocally not. Working hard and playing by the rules
is no guarantee of anything, nor can it be. You can be doing your job, your company can
be doing its job, and all can be well, and then someone - some twelve-year-old - will
come up with a better, cheaper, faster way to do what you do and you'll be out of a job.
That's how markets work. Just as "deserving to get into Harvard" has come to mean "better
than all the other students," "deserving to succeed in the economy" has come to mean "better
than all the other employees or all the other firms." Robert Frank describes this as a winner-take-all
society. I think this is a pretty accurate description. Appreciating the inevitability
of injustice and the centrality of good fortune might get us to ask ourselves what responsibilities
we have to people who do not get what they deserve. What responsibilities do we have
to stakeholders, and not just shareholders, when a town's dominant employer is threatening
to move offshore? What responsibilities do we have to families who seem to be doing everything
right, only to be thrown into chaos by a serious illness? I think it's easier for us to ask
these questions in an open-hearted way when we appreciate that financial success in life
has much in common with admission to Harvard - that lots of deserving people will fail.
And just as we want to assure a soft landing for teenagers whose envelopes from admissions
offices are thin, we want to assure them the possibility of an excellent education somewhere
else, so, too, we want to assure people who lose the market competition that they will
still be able to lead decent lives. The more we appreciate how much our own success in
life is a result of good fortune, the more open I think we'll be towards supporting people
who have not been quite as fortunate as we've been. Behind what philosopher John Rawls called
a "veil of ignorance," where you don't know how lucky you or your children will be, you
might be a bit more enthusiastic about policies that redistribute resources to favor the unlucky.
So what I'm trying to suggest is that an appreciation of how most people's lives, like my life,
have been a series of unplanned and uncontrollable opportunities that you may or may not take
advantage of, will make us more sympathetic to the role of luck in life, and thus more
sympathetic to people whose luck has been bad. What we don't want is to create a generation
of people who, to quote Molly Ivens about a president I won't name, who were born on
third base and thought they hit a triple. So I take my own life as an example of two
things. I deserve most of the good things that have happened to me. However, I did not
deserve the good fortune that gave me the opportunities that I was clever enough to
make the most of. Thank you so, so much for coming.