Very Bad Wizards12 Apr 2016

Episode 87: Lucky You (with Robert Frank)

We hit the jackpot with this one! Economist Robert Frank (you may remember him from such episodes as The Greatest Books Ever Written) joins David and Tamler to talk about his new book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. What role does pure chance play in making or breaking our careers and lives? Are effort and talent enough to succeed, or does the ball need to bounce our way? Where do we get our will-power and talent--is that ultimately a matter of luck as well? And what happens when we reflect on the lucky breaks we've received in our lives? Does it make us happier and more generous? Or do we feel like our accomplishments have been taken away? Plus a brief discussion of the Frank's revelatory 1988 book Passions Within Reason, and of some recent studies about how we convey our commitment to cooperate.

Links

Robert Frank [johnson.cornell.edu]
Robert Frank interviewed on Fox News by Stuart Varney [video.foxbusiness.com]
Ronald Coase [wikipedia.org]
Everett, J.A.C., Pizarro, D. A. & Crockett, M.J., (in press). Inference of Trustworthiness from Intuitive Moral Judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [papers.ssrn.com]
Passions within Reason by Robert Frank [amazon.com affiliate link]
Frank, R. H., Gilovich, T., & Regan, D. T. (1993). The evolution of one-shot cooperation: An experiment. Ethology and sociobiology, 14, 247-256.
Desteno, D., Breazeal, C., Frank, R. H., Pizarro, D., Baumann, J., Dickens, L., & Lee, J. J. (2012). Detecting the trustworthiness of novel partners in economic exchange. Psychological science, 23, 1549-1556. [pdf from davedesteno.com]
Frank, R.H. (2016) Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. [amazon.com affiliate link]

Special Guest: Robert Frank.

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