Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Why are Western societies so lucky? If you examine the history of America, for example, its establishment and expansion was just one lucky incident after another; it couldn't have been planned. There was no grand strategy fashioned by the Founding Fathers; they were simply the right people in the right place at the right time; in short, they were lucky. Societies are lucky because the people in them are lucky; not all the people, of course, but there's enough lucky people to make things happen, and Western societies allow them to retain the rewards of their luck, encourage it even.

Obviously, the question of lucky societies boils down to the nature of luck. Luck exits: you've certainly been lucky yourself on occasion; and luck is distributed like any random event, so on a societal level, there are some percentage of people who accomplish their goals, not necessarily because they have more merit than others but they are definitely luckier. At the extreme head of the curve, there are people who have had extraordinary luck; they've flipped heads ten times in a row, so to speak, and no one begrudges them, because if society builds on their luck, it can land a man in the moon. Recognizing how important luck is, societies that focus on the lucky accomplish great things, while those societies that hold back for the unlucky get mired down.