Category: Book Reviews

Read enough of these sorts of books and the ideas start to mash together.   In fact, they often use some of the same anecdotes and reference each other.   Into this general category, “success and luck”  I put books like “Drunkard’s Walk,” “The Success Equation,” “Fooled by Randomness,” “Signal and the Noise” and even “Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.”  I keep on coming back to these sorts of books because I like to consider the interplay between effort, randomness and uncertainty in our lives and in the greater scheme of things.
There is no such a thing as destiny.  History is contingent and so are our lives – contingent on our environment, on what came before, on our earlier choices and very much on random chance.  We have an illusion of control, well illusion of too much control.  It seems counter intuitive but we have more control over the things that matter to us if we properly recognize the role of randomness and let things happen.  This is not merely “going with the flow.”   If you find yourself in a strong current, you cannot successfully fight against it, but you can have a lot more choices if you determine its direction and use it to your advantage.  It is the old story of constrained free will that the Stoics used to talk about and about which thinkers like Saint Augustine wrote.  But let me finally get to “Success and Luck” book itself.
I started off not liking it.  The author seemed kind of preachy and seemed to have the agenda of telling his readers that their accomplishments were mostly the result of luck and so they should be happy to pay more in taxes.   It was a variation on the “you didn’t build that” idea that I loathe.  But as I got farther along, I saw the book really was more on the order of something like the “Success Equation.”  In fact, he specifically refers to that book and quotes some its examples.
He comes up with a reasonable assessment of the interplay between luck and effort in achieving success.   All of us, for example, are lucky to be living in 21^st Century America.  Because of the luck of out birth or immigration status, we have opportunities well beyond those of most people in the world and well beyond even those most fortunate of centuries past.   We are almost all of us absolutely better off than most of humanity today and way better off than almost all of humanity in historical terms.  But, Mr. Frank says, it is not our absolute positions that concern most of us, but our positions relative to others around us, our reference group.   If you are the richest guy in a poor place, you feel fortunate and empowered.  If you are the poorest in your gang of millionaires, you feel put upon and deprived.  This, he asserts, is hard wired into us by evolution, since your relative standing in your group determined what you got and your reproductive success, very important from a Darwinian perspective.  This idea becomes central to his policy prescriptions, which I will get to later.
Frank explains more about the role of luck.  He stipulates that most successful people work very hard and are intelligent and talented.  But intelligence and talent are necessary but not sufficient to achieve the greatest success.   Referring to the “paradox of skill” w/o actually calling it by that specific name, Frank explains that as the general level of expertise becomes very high, luck plays an increasingly important role.  Maybe 1000 people COULD do the job.   The high level of competence is a threshold requirement, a ticket in.  You cannot even begin to compete w/o it, but since all participants have it, the only differences will come from luck.   (Taking an example from a different book, “The Success Equation,” no baseball player will ever again achieve Ted Williams’ record.  It is not that modern players cannot achieve his level of absolute skill, but rather that the general level of skill has become so high that nobody can stand as far out anymore on skill alone.)
This brings Frank to a talk about the winner takes all society (the title of one of his earlier books.)  Small differences get magnified so that the winner may not be very much better than the second place finisher, but he gets the whole prize.  This is a big driver of inequality.  The winners small edge is enough to get it all and, according to Franks, sometimes, often, this small edge is due to luck.   He explains that every outcome depends on a combination of skill and luck.  In simulations where subjects are assigned skill levels and then given random luck scores, the most skillful subjects rarely actually win the top place and you can see why.   If you have a skill level ten and I have only five and we throw the dice with me getting twelve and you two, I win.  Skill indeed increases your odds, but in a situation with significant random chance it is not the determining factor.   Beyond that, future outcomes are influenced by past ones.  Take our example above.   When we started, your skill level was twice mine and your odds better.   But after the first roll of the dice, I am now at seventeen (5 skill +s 12 chance) and you start out at only twelve (10 skill + 2 chance). Since the dice have no memory, you may never catch up.   And in the real world it might be even more pronounced, since my greater opportunity would let me develop more expertise.
Frank’s prescription to address this problem is higher taxes, specifically a progressive consumption tax.  He feels this would have little or no effect on actual work, since it would maintain the relative position of all participants (as above, he thinks relative position is key) but would raise the big bucks needed to improve infrastructure on which all depend.   Even the rich would be better off, he says, since they would have better quality public goods (it is no fun to drive a great private car on a dilapidated public road) and since their relative positions would be unchanged, they would have similar incentive to work.
I don’t think his idea is a terrible way to raise revenue. In fact, it has advantages over income taxes. But it is an inelegant solution to the problem of luck and success.   The “problem” of randomness, IMO, is best addressed by more randomness, or more correctly a better recognition of random chance in our lives.   We spend way too much time and energy trying to be precise about things that cannot be measured with precision, finding exactly the best job candidate or student applicant.  It is likely that there is no “best” candidate, since future conditions will differ from past ones in significant but unpredictable ways.   Enter randomness.  Determine a pool of qualified candidates and then do a lottery.  This would have the advantage of partially negating the effects of autocorrelation, making the system much simpler and countering the myth that you have to pay so much more for just the exactly right talent.
I recommend “Luck and Success.”   I predict that mostly conservative readers will dislike the book at first, but come to appreciate it farther along, while mostly liberal readers will think he starts off right and then come off the tracks later.  I suppose that shows it is mostly balanced.   I would say, however, that better books on almost the same topic are “The Success Equation,” or “the Drunkard’s Walk.”

A delightful book, fun to read, but also lots of really good information about longleaf pine ecosystems.

By John Matel on July 10, 2016

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

The longleaf pine ecosystem may be the most diverse in North America because it combines aspects of prairie with an open forest, all of it created and maintained by regular fire, hence the title “Painting the Landscape with Fire.” Mr. Latham does an excellent job of explaining how and why this is true and often does this with interesting anecdotes and information from boots-on-the-ground participants.
Longleaf pine ecology once dominated large areas of the American South. Today, they tend to persist on poor soils like sand hills, leading some to assume that these are the sorts of sites longleaf prefer. More likely, they are the sites left to longleaf, places hard to log or unattractive for agriculture. The initial decimation of the longleaf ecosystem came when the piney forests were exploited for turpentine production and timber. They did not return because longleaf were often replaced by easier to establish loblolly pine forests and because fire was excluded.
Without frequent fire, longleaf will lose in competition with hardwood species and loblolly pine. A particularly strong and persistent competitor is the sweet gum. Fire tips the scales in favor of longleaf. Longleaf seedlings can tolerate fire that will kill loblolly, hardwoods and various brush. Longleaf has a unique set of adaptation. The seedlings are largely immune to fire. They grow a sturdy root system before growing up. They look like grass for a couple years and grow little above ground. In the grass stage, they are largely immune to all but the hottest fires. All at once they transition from the grass stage to the rocket stage. They might grow six feet in a single year with few or no branches along the way. This protects the terminal bud from many fires, since the fire can burn the stem, but there are no big branches to carry the fire to the living and growing top buds.
Unfortunately, fire use is declining, usually for liability and/or pollution control reasons. Professionals do not use the term “controlled fire” because no fire is 100% under control. They prefer the term “prescribed burns.” Any fire can get out of control and there are liability issues. These are becoming worse as there are more people building cottages, cabins and even houses in what used to be large expanses of forests. This human habitation also impacts from the pollution point of view. Where there is fire, there is smoke. Nobody likes the smoke and it may cause problems for viability and health issues.
Then there is the problem of carbon release. This is not really the issue it seems, but perception is as important as reality. Carbon from a burn will not in the long run be a net carbon emission. One reason is that the forest will burn sooner or later and if not in a prescribed way, in a worse one. Even if it does not burn, the litters will decompose, releasing carbon. Beyond that, green vegetation comes back quickly and stronger after a burn. By the end of the growing season, the area will be green and lush. More important, the fire burns above ground. Much of the carbon is below ground or in the tree trunks not burned. Regular fires actually sequester MORE carbon in roots and soils. It is hard to believe this when you see the smoke, but regular fires are helping to sequester carbon, not emit it.
As I wrote above, fire is necessary for the maintenance of longleaf pine and for the grassland and forbes that cover the ground. This is great for wildlife, so much so that bobwhite quail is sometimes called a “fire bird,” since it proliferates after fire. Frequent fires keep the ground clearer, so that the chicks can find seeds and the plants encouraged by fire are homes to insects that the chicks need for protein. Consider that a chick is only a couple of inches tall. It needs a place where it can see enough to find food but one that provides enough cover that the chick does not become food for predators. +
Land managers and owners need to make some trade-offs. The longleaf takes a little longer to establish compared with loblolly. Longleaf wood is better quality, but the longer growing time is a consideration to humans who know they may not live long enough to benefit from the longer rotation. In a natural setting, longleaf live a much longer time than loblolly. Longleaf may live 400 years (the oldest known was 462 years old when the book was written in 2013). Loblolly is lucky to be robust at the century mark.
There is a good chance that longleaf will be reestablished across its range, but it will never again achieve its old distribution. Interesting side note, forests in the American South owe much of their existence to the boll weevil. If you looked out over a tidewater landscape in South Carolina in 1910, would see mostly fields with just a few shade trees. Weevils, among other factors, made field agriculture less profitable and trees returned. Longleaf returned less than it might have because of the exclusion of fire, mentioned above. In the early days of the Forest Service, they campaigned against fire and succeeded very well. In a landscape painted by fire, taking that off the pallet changes the art.
“A Landscape Painted by Fire” is an excellent and informative book. I recommend it to anybody interested in ecology, restoration and naturalism in general.

Reference
Sadly, this makes way too much sense. Saw the program and finished the book today. I have seen much of what he describes, although never so extreme. I never saw any domestic violence, or much violence in general, for example. But I have seen a decline in culture and morality over my lifetime and a decline in the work ethic. Some of it is related to the decline of marriage among working people and the instability that goes with that.
The author makes several points that fit in well with my experience. For example, among working class boys it was/is a bad thing to be smart in school. I liked school, but I would not admit it around my friends, since liking school was for girls. If you did not want to get crap from your fellows, you literally played dumb. Another related, more subtle but maybe more insidious, idea is that you should not have to work hard at learning. If you are “good at it” you will just come naturally and if not you are just out of luck. Systematic practice applies to sports but not to learning.

Another good point relates to being in a different culture. I also did not know how to tie a tie or which fork to use at fancy dinner parties. I still recall very clearly how I taught my self how to use silverware properly by watching and copying the wife of the British ambassador. I actually practiced at home. I still don’t get how networking works for me. I got very good at using networks in my job, but I still cannot bring myself to use it for personal benefit. I know what to do and how to do it; I just cannot bring it to bear.

And there are some attitudes that I do not want to change. I deeply respect anybody who does a job well, no matter what that job is. I never want to feel that my status entitles me to something I did not earn. In my personal travels, I never used my diplomatic status to skip ahead, even when it was very tempting to do so.

The dominant idea that Vance and I share is that habits and behaviors to a very large extent determine outcomes. Vance mentions that his parents sometimes earned very high incomes, but their habits and behaviors kept them from being successful. We can recognize that nobody has an equal chance as anybody else w/o blaming failure on others or on terrible circumstances. Choices matter.

The decline of the white working class is serious threat to American democracy. We have always counted on this group to be the backbone of our society, the source of stability. I would not want to take the analogy too far, but the working class was like Boxer, the horse in “Animal Farm,” strong, dedicated and loyal, but undervalued. The “elites” could make fun of them/us knowing that they would always absorb it and keep on working. If that stops being true, we are in a world of hurt … and it looks like it is stopping being true.

On additional observation about Vance’s book, that may mitigate the pessimism above. There is a kind of negative survivor bias at work in his (and Murray’s and Putnam’s) examples. Those that have succeeded better have move up and away. The white working class today is smaller than in 1960 and not the same qualitatively. In 1960, most of them had only HS education or less. Today their kids often are college educated. Maybe that is the group we should be using as comparison.

Anyway, it is well worth watching the presentation and well-worth reading the book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

PS Vance was a Marine serving in Al Qaim until 2007. I am not exactly sure when he left. I visited Al Qaim in October 2007. He might have just left or just been leaving.