Luck of the Draw

If you had been born with your exact genetic makeup, but in another time and place, would you still have achieved whatever success you’ve had? Is the happiness you’ve gained mostly a matter of effort and determination, or do you owe a lot of your accomplishments to a fortunate but accidental combination of timing and location?

Listening this morning to the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC Radio, I heard something that surprised and annoyed me. The discussion was about health care legislation, a prime topic of debate in the U.S. as President Obama tries to accomplish a sweeping reform of our country’s dysfunctional medical insurance system.

The first caller to the show was a woman in Manhattan who argued that sick people should pay more for insurance than healthy people. She boasted that she exercises, eats well, and does not often become ill, so she resents having to pay the price for those who are not as responsible about their health as she is about hers.

Apparently this person does not understand that the whole meaning of insurance is to spread risk over a wide range of participants: that’s how and why it works. What the caller was advocating could not accurately be described as an insurance program at all, but more as a commodity approach to health care. Maybe that’s what she would prefer, but I find it disingenuous at best—and willfully dishonest at worst—when people put forward such market-based ideas and try to present them as “insurance.”

What this really reveals, though, in addition to an actual or feigned confusion about the basic principles of insurance, is an underlying tendency of some who have been lucky in life to protect their fortune under the pretense of having “earned it” while avoiding any responsibility toward others who’ve been less favored.

And now we get down to a fundamental question that draws a sharp line between liberals and conservatives: Does success in life depend mostly on talent and hard work, or is it largely a product of good luck?

Nearly everyone would say it’s obviously a combination of both. But, as with the longstanding nature/nurture debate about raising children, the real argument is over which factor is most important in determining outcomes. The answer each of us determines for ourselves will have a major impact on our approach to policy.

If you had been born with the exact genetic makeup you have now but in another time and place, would you still have been able to achieve whatever success you’ve had in life? Is the happiness you’ve gained mostly a matter of effort and determination, or do you owe a lot of your accomplishments to bonne chance, a fortunate but accidental combination of timing and location?

How much of a role did the “genetic lottery” play in the outcomes you’ve achieved? Reversing the question of the previous paragraph, let’s say you’d been born where and when you actually were, but that you’d had different parents and a significantly shuffled genetic makeup. In that case you’d be a different person, obviously, but with the same starting position, right? Well, maybe not. Instead of being born healthy (assuming you were) and smart (you must have been or you’d not be reading this), you might have been significantly disabled, or just not very bright.

So, if you can’t rightfully claim that all your success is based on what you’ve done, and if you must concede that a lot of it was dependent on circumstances beyond your control, then should you not recognize that those who’ve done less well than you may have been trying just as hard but simply been unlucky?

You might reply that although we can’t all have the same beginning opportunities, there’s nothing we can do to go back and change that, so there is no cause for guilt. I’d agree that feeling guilty is not a particularly productive activity, and moreover it’s true that you did nothing wrong to have put yourself where you were at life’s starting gate. But if you go on to assert that all you did was take advantage of what you were given, and if you say that because you made good there’s nothing to prevent anyone else from doing so—there I would have to disagree.

Even considering all that has been done in the last hundred years or so to give more opportunity to women and minorities in the United States, Canada, and Europe, the proverbial playing field is still not anywhere close to being level. A vastly disproportionate percentage of children in low-performing schools are those from poor neighborhoods, and they’re much more likely to be ethnic minorities as well. Active discrimination against women is so structural and institutionalized that it is often not even comprehended.

It seems there is little disagreement about the desirability of a “level playing field.” The question, really, is how best to achieve it. (There may be some who would say that any attempt to level the playing field for all is doomed to backfire, since it is against the general nature of reality. But I’m going to dismiss that attitude as being hopelessly medieval.)

For more than a century, governments around the world have debated the merits of private sector versus public investment in reaching an optimum level of equality and generally they have adopted a middle course, which is probably appropriate. The pendulum swings back and forth, but its momentum does tend toward increasing opportunity.

There is yet another thorny issue we must address, which is this: Is it enough simply to provide genuinely equal opportunity for all and then let nature and the markets determine the rest, or, on the other hand, should we make an effort to achieve at least a reasonable equality of outcomes?

Once again, opinions can be sharply divided. Those on the extremes will find themselves pretty lonely, though, because the prevailing consensus in both society and in government is that we all are better off when the poor are not too poor and the rich are not too rich. Although income disparities have risen significantly in the U.S.over the past few decades, a general—and generational—shift in attitudes will probably see that trend reversed in years ahead.

You may be wondering what all of this has to do with an organization that focuses on the ethics of emerging technologies. In fact, these are critical questions for us to consider, because those very technologies could have the effect, if they are not managed carefully, of exacerbating the discrepancy between the “haves” and the “have-nots” and may dramatically shift balances of power in multiple arenas, disrupting the careful equilibrium we have worked so hard to attain.

Whether it is performance enhancing substances, life extension therapies, molecular manufacturing, or sophisticated human-computer interfaces, the brave new world that awaits us will make these difficult questions even more urgent and decisive.