I always smile to myself when I hear on 93.8 people talking about fairness and merit. Sure, most of them were quick with self serving logic but no one (because those who knows better keep their own counsel) ever suggested than bad luck undo all your merit and good luck have often brought incompetents and the undeserving rich rewards and promotion.
What I find difficult to accept is how our ruling class have systematically designed bad luck out of their occupational lives. Unless you are caught in a CPIB or CAD case, you are immune to bad luck. You are too talented to waste and every mistake you make is an opportunity to learn but for others they often get punished. E.g., think Mas Selamat.
Wee Cho Yaw is a foxy businessman. In the early days he took potentially catastrophic risks and survived. When he no longer needed to live so dangerously, he took only calibrated risks whilst many others often confused their luck with their skill and get destroyed eventually. Why do you think he is in banking? That's the smartest thing to do in Singapore and many other places too. Look how bankers make their enterprises too big to fail. With that they could play heads they win and tails you lose. They have succeeded at designing bad luck out and by default will only have good luck making everything legal since they don't rob you as a result. This of course is cheating. Nassim Taleb has one of the most erudite and intellectually robust way to condemn this. Like the law of conservation of energy and matter, bad luck cannot be destroyed, it can only be transferred. Guess where they move their bad luck to? How do the bankers, the government etc., go about it? Why do you think they all try to limit transparency and accountability?
Update: 5:55pm
This is the nature of luck many of us have observed but often superficially.
When you are a start up, luck almost totally trumps smart. When you are a giant MNC or a monopolist, you can be bumping into billion dollar bad luck and still stick around.
The journey from start up to becoming an MNC, we all know the death rates. There are numerous ways to look at this from the business literature, but my late father always saw it as a matter of luck. You are not going to get published in HBR much less respected to offer luck as an explanation for random success. Everyone hates it. People want control.
It is the same with schooling. You have less luck (the now preferred word is opportunities) than when you are in the top schools (more opportunities). But this is nonsense. By definition luck is in nobody's control. The fine lady is married to no one. So what is really happening is that we have a system which controls the schooling environment. People don't see it this way, but we have designed good luck (but never completely) out of the neighborhood schools to the top schools. Luck is here systematic rather than random. The good possibiliites over total possiblities is smaller for a neighborhood school than the top schools, but almost all of us are not good at thinking statistically yet we are faced with more and more situations that demand such thinking. If you are clued in, you know this is also the age of Big Data.
Now this is also the same with the tax code too especially in America. I posted a story on this one recently. Apple paid little taxes because it took advantage of all the legal loopholes. If you are not an MNC, you aren't positioned to enjoy them.
Life for the rich and powerful is creating a system that allows you to push out your bad luck to other people. Because it is called luck and nobody controls luck, your bad luck is not the fault of the rich and powerful until it is carried too far. You will first feel it in your gut and then grasp it cognitively later when others explain the situation to you e.g., Robert Reich. Now all over the world we have indeed gone to far. I am not smart at all, I am simply stating what is becoming obvious. With my hurried and impatient writing nobody would understand me had I written this long ago. But I am blogging for myself!
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