How Lucky Are You Really?

0:00Two different children, two different babies born on the same day today, okay? In two different places, though. One born in Norway, one born in Sierra Leone, okay? Let me just give you some hard facts. Like you said, it's measurable. Let me give you some hard facts of, like, what that looks like at their starting points. The first one, let's say they're born in Oslo in Norway, okay? She will statistically, she has a very high chance of living to about 83 years old.

0:22Okay. That's her life expectancy at birth. She'll have access to free healthcare, free university education, one of the strongest social safety nets that's ever been built by humanity. She has access to that from day one, right? Her country's GDP per capita is about $82,000 per person. Childhood mortality risk, which is like the likelihood that she'll die before the age of five, is only two in 1,000. The infrastructure she has access to, like the roads there and hospitals and education, all of that is top rate.

0:53Some of the best you can find in the world, right? Obviously, she didn't choose any of that. Yeah. Right? Compare that to a child born the same day in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Okay. Life expectancy there at birth is 62. So full 21 years shorter than Norway. Country's GDP is about $800 per person per year. So about 100 times, more than 100 times less than in Norway. Childhood mortality risk is 94 in 1,000 compared to two in 1,000. Okay, so 47 times worse.

1:24The infrastructure, there's really, education is lacking access to healthcare, roads, recent civil war, lots of violence, no guarantees of safety. All of that is very, very present, okay? When we say, oh, this heaven look, like obviously if you're gonna choose, you'd wanna be born in Norway over Sierra Leone. Yes, those are stark differences. But what do we do with that information, Mark? Like, how are we supposed to think about that? You can look at that and you say, well, we're shit out of luck, right?

1:53There's a fatalism to it that's very easy to go to. But is that the right reaction? Yeah. And like we talked about in chapter one, our natural inclination is... the just world hypothesis, which is that whenever we see a large disparity between people, we assume that something unfair is happening or that it is inherently unfair. Maybe it is, but to your question of like, what do we do with that? I think it's ultimately, as with anything outside of our control, the best we can do is find a way to accept it and leverage it.

2:25I want to come back to this comparison because this idea of luck and who is lucky is, So there's a philosopher named John Rawls, and he has this amazing concept that he called the veil of ignorance. And basically what Rawls argued was that the only way to tell how just a society was was by doing a thought experiment. And that thought experiment was assume that you're not born yet and you get to choose which society you're going to be born into, not knowing what individuals you're going to be born as.

2:53So you don't know. Your gender, race, ethnicity, what your family situation is going to be like, what your talent is going to be like, what your IQ is going to be. The simple question is, is when presented with a society, would you choose to be born into that society or not? Now, from a veil of ignorance perspective, obviously, if offered the chance to be born into Norway or be born into Sierra Leone, I think pretty much everybody would choose to be born into Norway.

3:19But that doesn't mean that every single person in Norway is luckier than every single person in Sierra Leone, right? So you could be born into Norway and, I don't know, be born with some chronic disease or get cancer at the age of five or something and die when you're seven. Whereas in Sierra Leone, you know, there's plenty of stories of people who have overcome incredible hardship and actually become very fortunate. There was a story that I found about a local pastor who...

3:48was digging through a local riverbed looking for essentially gold dust and happened to stumble across the second largest diamond ever found. It was worth close to $10 million. And then this pasture ended up netting about two and a half million dollars for his trouble. Keep in mind, this isn't a country that they make less than a thousand dollars a year. And he just landed two Right. And he did all sorts of amazing things. He built schools, community centers, built roads, infrastructure for the community, gave a bunch of money away to friends and family and local children.

4:23Would you say he's lucky? Right. He's actually luckier than most other people on the planet, even though he was born into an extremely unlucky circumstance. And the reason I bring this up is that luck is ultimately simply a comparison between people. Reality and potential alternatives. And so by definition, luck is always relative. Like if you're saying that he's unlucky or he's lucky, it's lucky compared to what? Unlucky compared to what? Yes, it's unlucky to be born in Sierra Leone today versus being born into Norway today.

5:02But it's also lucky to be born in Sierra Leone today versus born there when there was a civil war raging. Or a hundred years ago when there was zero infrastructure and rampant colonialism. Or a thousand years ago where, like, you had... absolutely no basic services and the life expectancy was probably like 25 years old, right? So it's like lucky compared to what? The most important takeaway of heaven luck is that luck is ultimately a perspective.

5:33It's a frame of reference that you choose to adopt. It's a your life versus whatever else. You know, there's this old Chinese fable about the farmer and the horse, which I think illustrates this perfectly. So basically there was a poor farmer in ancient China and all he had was a single horse. And one day that horse runs away and his son comes running in, says, dad, dad, our horse is gone. This is terrible. We're so unlucky. And the farmer looks at his son and he says, good luck, bad luck.

6:08Who knows? And so the son goes looking for the horse, and he, like, wanders out into the wilderness, and he comes back the next day with five horses. Turns out that the horse that ran away went and found a bunch of horsey friends, and they hung out and had a little party, and then they came back together. So his son comes back, and he's got five. He's like, Dad, oh, my God, I can't believe it. We have five horses now. We're rich. We're so lucky. And the farmer looks at him and says, hmm, good luck, bad luck.

6:33Who knows? So then the son starts spending the next couple of weeks trying to train these wild horses, trying to tame them and get them to do farm work. And one day one of the horses rears up and kicks him off the back and the son falls and breaks his leg and the farmer's poor. So he has no, no other workers. It's just him and his son. And so the son is like, oh my God, dad, this is terrible. This is, we're so unlucky. I can't believe this happened to us.

6:57The farmer says, uh, good luck, bad luck. Who knows? And then a week later, the local militia comes through. There's a war has started, and the local lord or king of the local fiefdom is, like, recruiting, drafting young men into his army. They see the farmer's son sitting there with a broken leg, and they're like, oh, well, we can't draft him into the war, so... you know, we'll, we'll leave them here. And the son looks up at his daddy. He's like, Oh my God, we're so lucky dad.

7:24This is, thank God this happened. And his dad says, good luck, bad luck, who knows? And the story goes on and on and on. And it just keeps shifting back and forth. Right. And it's like the same exact occurrence is both lucky and unlucky, depending on the frame of that you can imagine that has not happened. And so in this sense, both feeling lucky and feeling unlucky is available to us in every moment, depending on simply what alternative realities we choose to imagine for ourselves.

8:02And as we'll see, this has very significant consequences. Hey everybody, that's it. The clip is over. This comes from The Solve Podcast. You can get the whole chapter and it's sitting right here.