ET CITINGS

ET CITING 

In some unknown proportion, genetic and environmental factors largely explain whether someone gets up in the morning feeling eager to begin work. If you’re such a person, you’re fortunate. Similarly, your genes and your environment determine how smart you are. If you’re smart, you’re more likely to perform well at the tasks rewarded lavishly by society, so there, too, you’re lucky.

As the economist Alan Krueger has noted, the correlation between parents’ income and their children’s income in the US is a remarkably high 0.5 — about the same as the correlation between parents’ height and their children’s. So, if you want to be highly energetic, the most important step you could take is to choose the right parents. But if you have such qualities, on what theory would it make sense for you to claim moral credit for them?

You didn’t choose your parents, nor did you have much control over the environment in which you were raised. You were just lucky. Many people don’t like to work hard and have limited endowments of cognitive abilities and other traits highly valued in the marketplace. In the competitive environments most of us inhabit, those people are unlucky.

In short, even if talent and hard work alone were enough to ensure material success — which they are not — luck would remain an essential part of the story. People with a lot of talent and an inclination to work hard are very fortunate.