Bryan Cranston was a middle-aged supporting actor when the producer Vince Gilligan proposed casting him in the leading role of his TV series Breaking Bad. Studio executives were reluctant to invest so heavily in an actor who had never been cast in a major dramatic lead role. So they offered the Walter White character to John Cusack. When Cusack turned them down, they tapped Matthew Broderick, who also declined. Gilligan again argued that Cranston would be right for the part, and executives finally relented.
Breaking Bad went on to become one of the most successful TV drama series of all time, in no small part because of Cranston’s riveting portrayal of the ailing high-school chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin. Cranston earned four Emmy Awards during the show’s five seasons and is now one of the most sought-after actors in the profession. He’s a gifted performer, to be sure, but there are thousands of other gifted performers who continue to labor out of the limelight. It seems safe to say that Cranston would not have become a superstar if either Cusack or Broderick had taken the Walter White role.
Career trajectories in acting offer some of the clearest illustrations of the positive-feedback process known as the Matthew effect, after the verse in the book of Matthew that reads, “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Positive-feedback processes make career trajectories highly path dependent. Small random differences at any point can easily ramify into enormous differences in final outcomes.
But the Matthew effect applies with a vengeance in academe, where even the first letter of a professor’s last name can spawn significant achievement differences. One study, for example, found that assistant professors in the 10 top-ranked economics departments were more likely to get tenure the earlier the first letter of their last name fell in the alphabet. The study’s authors attributed that effect to the custom in economics of listing authors’ names alphabetically on co-authored papers, noting that they found no similar effect for professors in psychology, which does not list authors alphabetically.
It’s easy to see how economists named Adams or Baker might fail to notice whatever small edge they may have enjoyed by virtue of their surnames. But in cases like my own, luck’s contribution was simply too conspicuous to ignore. Shortly after I finished my graduate studies and began teaching at Cornell, a young professor who’d been involved in my hiring told me that I was the seventh of the seven new professors that Cornell’s economics department had just hired, which were several more than it had hired in any previous year. Under normal circumstances, then, I wouldn’t have gotten a Cornell offer, and my only other offer was from a non-research-oriented school in the Midwest.
My getting tenure at Cornell was even less likely than having been hired here in the first place. By the end of my third year, I had only a single published paper, my Ph.D. thesis contained little of interest, and I had essentially nothing else in the pipeline. These days, assistant professors with records like that almost always get fired during their third-year review. But standards were looser then, and since I was doing well in the classroom and didn’t cost much, the department renewed my contract for another three years. Still, my prospects for being able to stay beyond that were bleak at best.
During my fourth year, Ned Gramlich, a visiting faculty member, encouraged me to write a paper for a volume he was assembling. Publishing papers in edited volumes isn’t a valuable career move for an academic economist, but since I was so far behind schedule, I readily agreed. Shortly after I’d completed a draft of my paper, Ned came to my office with a crestfallen expression, saying that the publisher had just called to report that the project had been canceled. Bad luck!
Or so it seemed. On a lark, I sent the paper to Econometrica, one of the most prestigious and selective journals in economics. Less than two months later, I received an acceptance letter with no demands for substantive revisions. Encouraged by that success, I dashed off a simple extension of the paper and submitted it to another leading journal. An acceptance letter arrived only a few weeks later, again with no demand for significant changes.
The following summer, I wrote three more papers and sent them out for review. Bang, bang, bang, I quickly received acceptance letters from the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and The Review of Economics and Statistics, each a top-tier journal in economics with acceptance rates lower than 10 percent. And once more, there were no demands for substantive revisions.
In striking contrast, most of the scores of papers I’ve published since those early years were rejected by at least one journal, some by as many as four, and in only a few instances did I even receive an editorial decision before six months or more had elapsed. When my papers weren’t rejected outright, editors invariably demanded extensive revisions, with no promise to publish before the changes had been carefully vetted, a step that extended the review process by at least several more months.
I remain proud of some of those first papers, but I firmly believe that the ones I’ve written in the years since are of generally higher quality. The only plausible conclusion is that my early run of success occurred against astronomically long odds.
So except for a wildly improbable string of chance events, I would never have enjoyed the opportunity to interact with so many intelligent and stimulating students and colleagues during the past decades. I wouldn’t have been invited to so many interesting conferences. I wouldn’t have received so many research grants. I wouldn’t have been invited to spend 10 days with the Dalai Lama in India, or to write an economics column for The New York Times. I got lucky.
The bold shadow of chance events may have made luck’s importance difficult to ignore in my case, but randomness often plays out in far more subtle ways. And in such cases, normal patterns of human cognition cause most of us to underestimate luck’s contribution to our successes. That tendency, in turn, significantly reduces our willingness to support the public investments that made those successes possible in the first place.
Although my family didn’t have much money, I graduated debt-free from an excellent state university. But with support for public education having fallen sharply in recent decades, more than 70 percent of graduates of four-year colleges now emerge with student-loan balances that average about $33,000. The parents of children higher up the income ladder have the means to compensate for budget and program cutbacks that have been occurring in the public schools. They can send their children to private schools, or pay for private music lessons, athletic coaching, and SAT prep courses. Those options are beyond reach for low-income households.
Being born in a good environment is an enormously lucky thing and one of the only lucky things we can help determine for future generations. Basically, we get to decide, to some extent, how lucky our children will be. We’ve been doing a bad job of it for at least a generation, underfunding our material, educational, and social infrastructure. The luckiest among us are getting luckier even as their numbers shrink. Meanwhile, the unlucky population is growing, and its luck is getting worse.
The good news is that simply asking people to reflect on luck’s role in their lives makes them more likely to feel grateful for any successes they’ve enjoyed. And as compelling evidence demonstrates, experiencing gratitude makes people substantially more willing to contribute to the common good. In one widely cited study, for example, the Northeastern University psychologist David DeSteno and his co-authors prompted a group of laboratory subjects to feel grateful, and then gave them an opportunity to take actions that would benefit others at their own expense. Subjects in whom gratitude had been induced were significantly more willing to spend time and money helping others than were those in a control group. This pattern has been replicated in numerous other studies.
So I hope you’ll talk with your friends about their experiences with luck. In the process, you may persuade them to support a more ambitious program of public investment. But even if not, you’ll almost surely hear some interesting stories. And I’m confident you’ll discover, as I have, that with only a little prompting, even people who have never given much thought to the subject are often surprisingly willing to rethink their life stories and to recall specific examples of lucky breaks they’ve enjoyed along the way.
Robert H. Frank is a professor of management and economics at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, and the author of Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, new from Princeton University Press.
