The Pecking Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become by Dalton Conley

Author:Dalton Conley [Conley, Dalton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

So what is the ultimate role of “luck”—i.e., outside influences? Though Christopher Jencks does cite luck as important in explaining the non-family portion of socioeconomic differences, he also admits that

those who are lucky tend, of course, to impute their success to skill, while those who are inept believe that they are merely unlucky. If one man makes money while speculating on real estate while another loses it, the former will credit his success to good judgment, while the latter will blame his failure on bad luck. So, too, if a worker's firm expands rapidly and promotes him, he will assume this is a tribute to his foresight in picking the right firm and his talent on the job. If his firm goes broke and leaves him with an unmarketable set of specialized skills, he will seldom blame himself. In general, we [Jencks and his colleagues] think luck has far more influence on income than successful people admit.19

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.