perfidy

The Boston Globe is running a thought-provoking piece in which correspondent Matthew Miller interviews Milton Friedman and Willam Bennett on the role of the "birth lottery" in shaping people's lives.

It's a bit of a mind-blower, in that we find Bennett taking a stand directly BETWEEN nature and nurture, and Friedman asserting that free will isn't really free, not exactly.

In his Washington office, I asked Bennett which he thought was a bigger factor in determining where people end up: luck (by which I meant the pre-birth lottery), or personal initiative and character.

The normally voluble Bennett fell quiet.

"Genes are part of the first?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Parents are part of the first?"

"Yes."

"The first," he said. That is, luck.

Recalling his years as Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, he explained, "Having visited the schools, I'm convinced that you can change people's lives and people can change their own lives. But it's hard. Those things [genes, parents] matter hugely. They don't matter completely. But they matter hugely."

What should that imply for public policy? I asked.

Bennett cited the Marine Corps as proof of the "plasticity" of human nature, and of the potential for institutions to alter luckless lives for the better. Kids from the inner city come back from boot camp after 11 weeks and they're transformed, Bennett said, with new values, a new spirit, a new future. Mediating institutions -- family, churches, schools -- can create opportunities for people to "exercise autonomy and make a difference in their own lives. A lot of people aren't there because they're in crappy families, crappy schools, crappy neighborhoods."

. . . . . . .
Early in his career, Friedman (the son of poor Hungarian Jewish immigrants) wanted very much to prove -- mathematically -- that luck isn't as important in human affairs as we instinctively presume. In a 1953 paper called "Chance, Choice, and the Distribution of Income," he argued that inequality of income results not merely from chance, but also from the choices, tastes, and preferences of individuals. People who have a taste for working less, for example, and for spending more time basking in the sun, earn less. It's their own choices -- not luck -- that helps shape the inequality of income. . . .

"I think that luck plays an enormous role," he went on. "My wife and I entitled our memoirs, 'Two Lucky People.' Society may want to do something about luck. Indeed the whole argument for egalitarianism is to do something about luck. About saying, `Well, it's not people's fault that a person is born blind, it's pure chance. Why should he suffer?' That's a valid sentiment."

So what are the implications of luck for public policy?

"You've asked a very hard question," he said. In part, he added, because it's not clear that what we think of as luck really isn't something else. "I feel," he said, "and you do, too, I'm sure, that what some people attribute to luck is not really luck. That people are envious of others, you know, `that lucky bastard,' when the truth of the matter is that that fellow had more ability or he worked harder. So that not all differences are attributable to luck."

"I know it's not all luck," I agreed, but I added that it's legitimate to wonder whether it's luck, as opposed to personal initiative and character, that most accounts for where one ends up.

"That's right," Friedman said. "But that's luck, too." Was Friedman saying that character was ultimately a matter of luck? Where does luck stop and free choice begin?

"See, the question is. . . What you're really talking about is determinism vs. free will," he explained. "In a sense we are determinists and in another sense we can't let ourselves be. But you can't really justify free will." . . .

This awareness of luck's role -- even if he wouldn't have put it quite this way as a younger man -- is what led Friedman to stress the importance of providing equal opportunity via education, and of keeping careers open to talent. Friedman also told me that it inspired his call for the provision of a decent minimum to the disadvantaged, ideally via private charity, but if government was to be involved, via cash grants that in the 1950s he dubbed a "negative income tax."

There's more-- read the whole thing. It's an interesting contribution to the debate over equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Personally, I lean towards the "allowing all equal opportunity" end of the spectrum, because it's impossible to give everybody the same exact piece of pie. But to go too far toward the "equality of opportunity", to wit, asserting that circumstance doesn't matter as long as the law is blind, is deterministic, mechanistic, and profoundly un-humanistic. And also stupid.

Of course, the article is a bit of a puff piece, not a policy statement, so the question as to what, if any, social programs aimed at improving the situation of people unlucky enough to be born to crappy parents in a crappy neighborhood with crappy schools, would be appropriate.