Does “Luck” to Mean “Anything That Happens Anywhere in the Universe”?
It does to some people
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I recently wrote a piece criticizing policies that produce a few lucky winners and a whole bunch of losers. And speaking of “a whole bunch of losers”: There were critics of that argument.1 Some people felt that my distinction made little sense because every policy creates winners and losers, and that the luck involved was no different from the luck involved in virtually any outcome. My response to that criticism is that I was criticizing policies that create more losers than winners, and also that my critics should be pecked to death by crows for daring to contradict me.
Even so: I think luck is an important concept, especially when it comes to policy making. An implicit idea behind a social safety net is the notion that not all outcomes are moral verdicts passed down from the almighty. Also, anyone with any life experience has seen well-made plans go to shit and quarter-baked dumbassery come up aces — luck stalks all of us, always. There’s an entire branch of philosophy about “moral luck”, and I don’t intend to review that body of work in that post, but I do intend to pluck out the parts that I care about, add some dirty jokes, and then dive behind my “I’m just a comedian!” reinforced lead shield the minute I get pushback.
Imagine two people. I’m going to make them movie producers, because as far as I can tell, movie producing is the most capricious and unknowable endeavor mankind has ever attempted — the only hard rule seems to be “Don’t let actors write”.
Suppose that Producer A invests in a big-budget space epic based on Pop Rocks. Meanwhile, Producer B invests in a CGI kids movie about a rapping hedgehog that’s actually an allegory for the Seven Years War. This scenario is bizarre, but also standard in the movie business — I assure you that there are people agonizing over decisions at least this stupid at this very moment.
