Abstract
The Random Factor: How Chance and Luck Profoundly Shape Our Lives and the World around Us is a very interesting book that should be discussed by sociologists of many different kinds. Mark Robert Rank combines social science findings with philosophy, in and of itself a complicated thing to do. And the book wraps those ideas up within a concept with large public currency: luck. We need better ways to communicate information to the public that could help them understand the complexities of social life and what kinds of policies are likely to improve their circumstance. This book is a model of one way to achieve that. It might be called the Trojan Horse method.
Ostensibly, the book is about luck—a topic likely to interest a mass market audience or the editors and publishers that control access to that public market. However, it quickly becomes clear for readers familiar with John Rawls that the issue of luck or randomness is actually providing an entrée to discuss his theory of justice. This is confirmed in Chapter Six, which introduces Rawls’s philosophy in an explicit way.
The role of chance or luck is wielded to show that inequalities in society are likely to burden anyone, no matter their characteristics. Since we and our children all face the random draw of life, does it not make sense that we should favor policies that give everyone a fair break, or at least shield them from the most extreme consequences of bad luck? This reasoning serves as an argument for a social safety net and other moderate, fair-minded approaches. The case is made in a way that seems to have a high probability of reaching and persuading a non-academic public, although what they would make of it is hard to say, of course—perhaps we’ll get TikTok videos instructing people on how to arrange their house to make them luckier, or we might get more equitable social policy. It is hard to say.
In any case, the goal is laudable. But there are ways in which the message may not hit home in the way it is intended.
The first chapters essentially soften up the audience, getting them used to the idea of randomness in life and nature. The real argument starts when inequalities are taken up in later chapters. Here the argument is made, supported by a great deal of high-quality research, that if you use all known factors about a person to estimate their earnings, you can only explain a smallish amount of the variance.
The problem here for a public or policy audience is significant. The target audience very likely already believes that there are a million differences between people of the same age and experience that could explain differences in their apparent success that are not captured by race, class, age, or gender—or indeed any of the observable measures social scientists are able to put in their regression models. Indeed, it has arguably been the mission for social scientists to prove that structural factors, rather than highly unique, variable, and difficult-to-measure individual characteristics, are responsible for social outcomes. The fact that these structural measures matter shows that it is not individual characteristics that determine outcomes. This book inverts this approach and says that because outcomes are not structural (i.e., related to social scientific variables), it is not about the individuals.
So, one question is whether the public will interpret the unexplained part as random or individual—that is, something to do with skill or fortitude or some such. Another question is whether these unobserved variables are actually related to individual characteristics or to luck and randomness.
Here I want to shift gears and raise issues unrelated to popular appeal. The book does not actually give and apply a rigorous definition of luck, so there is a lack of clarity about when randomness is luck, when it is structure, and when it is something that we just haven’t measured, observed, or theorized yet. When we are thinking about agency and outcomes, then everything else is considered under the rubric of luck. But when we are thinking about structure and outcomes, everything else is considered under the rubric of luck. So shouldn’t we be considering at least three things, namely, structure, agency, and luck?
The distinction between structure and agency matters also in the sections on historical events, where chance outcomes seem to determine all of history, but it is unclear whether those events actually cause the outcomes or whether they are themselves produced by structural undercurrents. This can be seen as an “all rivers flow to the sea” problem. Rivers take a lot of twists and turns, but they all flow down in the end. Finally, the Rawlsian approach requires—or comes close to requiring—that we imagine fully formed persons in the waiting room of life, with characteristics, like neighborhood, assigned to them as they emerge into being. I am not sure I buy that model of existence. I am also not sure I need a Rawlsian justification to want to limit the suffering of my fellow humans. But I do very much like the subversion of the self-help section of the book, which emphasizes empathy and gratitude over productivity and efficiency. I hope The Random Factor will be read and discussed widely and will encourage more conversations about the important implications of social science research for social provisions, ethics, and life more generally.