A few years ago, researchers at
the University of California conducted an experiment. They gathered student volunteers and divided
them into teams segregated by gender—three men or women per team. They randomly chose one student from each
group to act as leader. Then they put
the groups into separate rooms, where each was presented with a complex moral
problem to solve.
Thirty minutes later, the
researchers interrupted each team, entering the room with a plate of four
cookies. Each of the three team members
obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. This
should have been awkward—but it wasn’t. With incredible consistency whoever had been
arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it,
without any hesitation whatsoever.
This person had performed no
special task. After all, the leaders had been chosen at random. Their position
was based on nothing but dumb luck. Yet it
left them with the sure sense that the cookie should be theirs.
Michael
Lewis, the author of Moneyball and Liar’s Poker, shared this account in a
commencement address he delivered at Princeton University. He used it to sound a warning against a real
and present danger: the tendency of those blessed with prosperity to attribute
their good fortune to merit and, by corollary, to insinuate that the poor are
deserving of their misfortune. This
notion of America as a meritocracy, where success is a sure sign of virtue, is
actually written into the 2012 Republican party platform, which touts its “positive, optimistic view of an
opportunity society where any American who works hard, dreams big and follows
the rules can achieve anything he or she wants.”
Torah
recognized the fallacy in such thinking three thousand years ago. Deuteronomy 8 warns of the hubris that can
accompany prosperity, of misconstruing wealth as a mark of our own merit: “The
Eternal is bringing you into a good land. . . in which you will lack nothing. And you shall eat and be satisfied and bless
the Eternal for the gift of this good land.
But beware, lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my
own hand have gotten me this treasure.’”
The
Talmud speaks of the true nature of affluence and paucity when it notes: “If one man does not come into poverty, his son
may; and if his son does not come into it, his son's son may, for poverty is a
wheel that goes around and around the world.”
Therefore, those who are blessed with good fortune must never forget
that much of what we have is due to dumb luck. Our advantages are largely a fluke—as
are the disadvantages of the underclass.
Contrary to that Republican platform, many Americans work hard and dream
big and receive very little in return.
And others, born into tremendous privilege, hardly work a day in their
lives, yet live like kings and queens.
This
reality creates a kind of moral responsibility.
When we realize that wealth is largely unearned, we understand that
those who can afford to do so ought to share significant share of their bounty
with those in need. As Michael Lewis
concluded in his address to those privileged Princeton graduates: “Above all, recognize that if you
have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You
owe a debt to the unlucky.
All of you
have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more
of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra
cookie. For all I know, you may. But you'll be happier, and the world will be
better off, if you at least pretend that you don't.”
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