What the Luck? The Surprising Role of Chance in our Everyday Lives

Fact:In Israel, pilot trainees who were praised for doing well subsequently performed worse, while trainees who were shouted at for doing poorly performed better.Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent.Students who get the highest scores in third grade generally get lower scores in fourth grade.Truth:It’s wrong to conclude that shouting is a more effective tool.It’s wrong to conclude that women choose men whose intelligence does not intimidate them.It’s wrong to conclude that schools are failing their students.There’s one reason for each of these truths: a concept called regression to the mean. It explains how we can be misled by luck in our day-to-day lives. An insufficient appreciation of luck and chance can wreak all kinds of mischief in sports, education, medicine, business, politics, and more. Perfectly natural random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the meaningless and in What the Luck?, statistician Gary Smith explains how an understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives . . . and can help us learn to rely less on random chance, and more on truth.

Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He has written (or co-authored) ten books and seventy-five academic papers on finance, sports, and statistical pitfalls. His research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Motley Fool, Newsweek and BusinessWeek. He was a guest speaker on CNBC, and a keynote speaker at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and the Mortgage Finance Industry Summit in New York City. He received his B.A. in Mathematics with Honors from Harvey Mudd College and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University.