Our lives are shaped by chance events. This has wide ramifications.

Where I didn’t get a job

            In 1974, I was finishing my PhD thesis at Sydney University and applied for a lectureship in physics at Murdoch University, in Perth, which was taking its first students the next year. Bruce, the foundation professor of physics at Murdoch, visited Sydney and interviewed me. He thought he would be able to make two appointments, and he later told me that I was his #2 choice. But when Bruce got back to Perth, it turned out he was able to make only one appointment. Instead of moving to Perth and throwing myself into creating innovative physics curricula, I was to have a very different career. Was I lucky or unlucky?

            Much of our life is outside our control. It starts with birth. As is often said, no one chooses their parents. You might be lucky to be born into an affluent, loving family, or unlucky to be born into poverty and abuse.

Would you be lucky to be this baby?

            When you meet the love of your life, your closest friends and your work colleagues, luck seems to play a big role. It often boils down to what seem to be chance meetings, chance introductions, chance opportunities.

            Think of one of your best friends. What would it mean to have met them without chance being a factor? Maybe this would involve you searching databases, across many countries, to find the ideal person to be your friend. But then you’d probably need to move far away to be with them or spend a lot of time online with them. Would they be receptive? Usually, it’s far easier to make friends with people you just happen to meet.

            Then there’s tragedy, for example a terrible car crash. I’ve heard people say, regarding a serious accident, “If only I hadn’t decided to go out that night.” Seldom do they say, “If only I had gone through that intersection ten seconds later.” A few seconds can make all the difference.

            If these sorts of thoughts interest you, there’s far more in The Random Factor by social scientist Mark Rank. He provides so many examples that you might wonder whether anything isn’t due to chance. Consider the solar system. If the earth had been a bit hotter or colder, or with a different chemical composition, life might not have developed. Rank tells of the asteroid that collided with the earth 66 million years ago, a massive catastrophe wiping out the dinosaurs and enabling mammals to proliferate. If the asteroid had missed the earth, or even just impacted in a different location, humans might never have emerged.

            Next, there’s birth. The creation of a new human is an amazing process of combining genetic materials from parents, and the result is fairly random unless you’re a test-tube baby. There are also numerous sources of randomness for each of us after birth. How you develop depends on the people around you, parents and others, and chance occurrences such as what teachers you have and what country you live in.

            In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of nuclear weapons were tested, spewing tonnes of plutonium into the atmosphere. If you happen to breathe in a microgram of insoluble plutonium oxide, you might end up with lung cancer. Bad luck!

            In some spiritual traditions, events are preordained, so what seem to be chance events are planned at some level. Perhaps past, present and future are fixed and we are just moving through the universe. Rank, however, adopts a scientific worldview in which randomness is a fundamental feature of reality.

            Random events that affect other people can also affect you. Hitler applied to attend art school but was rejected. It was a near thing. If he had been accepted, there might not have been Nazi rule in Germany, World War II or the Holocaust. Blame it on the art school!

What if Hitler had succeeded in his art career?

            In October 1962, the world came close to global nuclear war. The governments of the US and the Soviet Union clashed over Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. Rank describes several crucial decisions during the crisis when Soviet personnel prevented launching nuclear missiles.

Beliefs about chance

Rank challenges some common beliefs about chance, such as that luck evens out in the long run. To the contrary, good fortune tends to lead to more good fortune, and bad to more bad, in what is called cumulative advantage or disadvantage. In the US, a person born male, black and in poverty is far more likely to be arrested, often leading to a downward spiral.

            Despite the crucial role of randomness in human lives, many people believe that hard work always pays off. Rank argues that this is misguided, giving examples of people who end up badly despite their utmost efforts. The belief in hard work paying off is especially prevalent in the US, the country with the highest level of individualism and, not coincidentally, the highest level of economic inequality among industrialised societies.

            It may be especially difficult for those who are well off, successful in their careers and admired by peers to accept that good luck played a crucial role in their lives. It is more flattering to believe good fortune is deserved. In the academic world, receiving a sizeable research grant is a source of pride and failing to obtain grants a source of disappointment, even shame, yet studies have shown that luck plays a significant role in grant success: the outcome depends sensitively on which assessors are chosen to evaluate an application. Tell that to a successful applicant!

            Rank argues that recognising the role of luck in social outcomes provides a rationale for policies to support the poor and disadvantaged, for example through a guaranteed annual income. He uses the ideas of political philosopher John Rawls to make this argument, but it is really simple: if chance events, such as who your parents are, are influential in life outcomes, then no one deserves to live in poverty. The same line of thinking leads to the conclusion that no one deserves great wealth or great fame.

Mark Rank

Uses of randomness

There’s another possible use of randomness, not addressed by Rank. It can serve as a tool for generating better social outcomes, by countering bias and self-interest.

            One example is choosing members of a court jury. Why choose jury members randomly from the population, members without special expertise, rather than rely on trained and experienced judges? One rationale is that it reduces corruption. Jury members go back to their lives outside the court after a single case, meaning they are less easy to bribe than a sitting judge. A second rationale is the process of deliberation. After hearing the evidence, jury members discuss the case and seek to arrive at a consensus. This process is valuable for raising, assessing and reconciling a variety of views.

            What about other decision-makers, like politicians? The ancient Greeks chose many of their leaders using sortition, aka random selection. In ancient Athens, they used a device called a kleroterion to randomly select jurors and public officials. According to David Van Reybrouck, author of Against Elections, random selection is the authentic form of democracy, whereas representative government serves privilege.

            The idea of sortition has been resurrected in recent decades with the use of randomly selected groups of citizens to deliberate on policy issues such as euthanasia and climate change. This is a form of participatory democracy, known as deliberative democracy, in which citizens deal with issues directly, in contrast to only relying on elected representatives. In Ireland, citizens’ assemblies help the parliament and government develop policies on contentious issues such as abortion and marriage equality. In various countries, citizen juries have helped establish government budget priorities and land use policies, as well as addressing issues such as aged care and vaccination policies.

            There’s much more going on, for example systems for selecting applicants to schools and universities and for panels to design electoral systems. The point here is that random selection can be used to overcome bias and corruption.

            Some people live in mansions while others are homeless. Barbara Goodwin in Justice by Lottery proposed that housing be assigned randomly: every five years, everyone would be reassigned to a different house.

Your house?

It sounds crazy, but it has one important feature. If you knew you might end up in terrible lodgings, you’d want to push for a basic minimum of housing quality. Randomness thus could become a motive for greater equality. Actually, Goodwin’s hypothetical society named Aleatoria is based on periodically reassigning, by chance, not just housing, but also jobs and other assets. In her “total social lottery,” the regular redistribution of roles and rewards serves to counter the initial random distribution of assets — parents, talents, etc. — at birth. Goodwin uses Aleatoria to make the case for equality.

            Randomly allocated housing isn’t coming any time soon, but as a thought experiment it is illuminating. It’s an example along the lines of Rank’s: pondering the role of chance in our lives potentially can make us more supportive of those in need and more grateful for what we have.

            After I didn’t get the physics lectureship at Murdoch University, my life followed quite a different trajectory. Decades later, by chance I talked with the fellow who obtained the one physics lectureship there back in 1975. He said, “Brian, you’re so lucky you didn’t end up here.” Well, maybe so, but there have been too many other chance events along the way to know for sure.

            Another thought. If I had gone to Murdoch, then decades later I might never have noticed or read The Random Factor or written a blog post about it, and you wouldn’t be reading it now. How lucky is that?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela, Lyn Carson, Mark Diesendorf and Julia LeMonde for useful feedback.