Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H. Frank

Author:Robert H. Frank [Frank, Robert H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-04-19T06:00:00+00:00

6

THE BURDEN OF FALSE BELIEFS

If you share my view that material prosperity is a good thing, there is one dimension of personal luck that transcends all others, which is to have been born in a highly developed country. No matter how talented and ambitious you may be, material success is only a remote possibility in the world’s poorest countries.

Recall my description of Birkhaman Rai, the young Bhutanese hill tribesman who worked as my cook long ago during my stay as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. Because he didn’t know how to read or write, I couldn’t keep in touch with him after returning to the United States, but I’ve often wondered what became of him. He was as talented and resourceful as anyone I’ve ever known, yet he probably never managed to earn even the meager average Nepalese income, currently somewhat less than $1,500 a year.

If he’d been born here, he’d almost surely be a highly prosperous, perhaps even very wealthy, man today. If he’s still alive, he would be in his seventies, well past the normal life expectancy for men in Nepal. Had he been born here, however, he could expect many more years of good health and prosperity.

Of course, individuals can’t choose the environments into which they’re born. But society as a whole can mold those environments in significant ways. Doing so, however, requires intensive levels of investment. We who were born into highly developed countries are thus the lucky beneficiaries of centuries of intensive investment by those who came before us.

In recent decades, however, those investments have been depreciating. A 2013 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that the United States faced a $3.6 trillion backlog in essential maintenance for existing infrastructure.1 Crumbling roads and unsafe bridges are common across the country, as are failing water and sewage systems. Millions live downstream from dams that could collapse at any moment. Countless school buildings are in disrepair.

We’ve also done little to expand and improve existing infrastructure. Morocco, a country whose per capita income is roughly a tenth that of the United States, is nearing completion of a 350-kilometer high-speed rail link between Casablanca and Tangier. Trains along much of that line will travel at 200 mph. In the United States, which has one of the world’s most densely populated rail corridors, proposals to build high-speed rail consistently fail in Congress. The fastest trains along our northeast corridor average only 80 mph.

Even more troubling, support for public education has diminished sharply in recent decades. Using revenue and spending data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Delta Cost Project Database,2 one carefully documented study estimates that reduced state funding accounted for roughly 80 percent of the past decade’s more than $3,000 increase in average annual tuition at public four-year universities.3 More than 70 percent of students graduating from four-year colleges in 2014 had student loan balances that averaged $33,000.4

More troubling still has been the pattern of reduced investment on behalf of children in low-income households.

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