Success needs every prerequisite at once, and each one is a probability. Five conditions at two-in-five each leaves a one percent chance — which is also a ninety-nine percent chance of failing.
Source · Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities — ‘Disparities and Prerequisites’
— Reflections on Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (“Disparities and Prerequisites”)
My apologies for another delicate title — one that stands in complete contradiction to the piece I published two days ago.
But perhaps you will understand: these are two attitudes toward success operating at different levels, and the two pieces are not substantively in conflict.
The purpose of this piece is to convey the mechanism by which inequality is generated, not to serve up the motivational broth of success literature.
This piece originates in a single passage from the book:
Whether the missing prerequisite is complex or simple, its absence negates the effect of every other prerequisite that is present.
Roughly: we must possess all the prerequisites of success simultaneously in order to be worthy of having success.
This inevitably calls to mind a familiar complaint — “Why is it that we’ve read so many books and still can’t live this life well?” Set aside for the moment the limitations of knowledge, the conversion of knowledge, and the definition of “living well.”
Taking the sentence at face value: perhaps it is precisely the books we have not read that are shaping our lives.
My first encounter with Sowell came through the line that understanding the limitations of human beings is the beginning of wisdom. That, too, explains something here.
And somehow I have circled back to the subject of “success.”
Frankly, I find this puzzling myself — why do I always return to this topic? I suspect there are two reasons:
But it is worth clarifying one premise: the subject of success is not only the individual, but also the group, the organization, the society, the nation. Sowell’s analysis in the book is likewise not confined to individual success.
The precondition of success is that one must possess all the prerequisites of success simultaneously.
A simple illustration:
Suppose success “X” requires five prerequisites, and the probability of obtaining any one of them is identical at 2/5.
To succeed, we must obtain all five. The probability of obtaining all of them is therefore 2⁵/5⁵ = 32/3125 ≈ 1%.
This means not only that the probability of success is extremely low, but simultaneously that the probability of failure is 99%.
Which returns us to the opening line: whether the missing prerequisite is complex or simple, its absence negates the effect of every other prerequisite that is present.
We must possess all the prerequisites of success simultaneously to be worthy of success.
When we possess ability, talent, and every other prerequisite — but happen to lack the family background or other social factor that partisans of the unconstrained vision invoke in advocating equality of outcome — that alone may cause success to pass us by.
When the prerequisites change, our existing mastery of the old ones loses its meaning — Kodak’s bankruptcy; Evergrande’s collapse.
Precisely because success is this difficult, outcomes are highly skewed in distribution — unequal, and undispersed.
Only the very few who possess every prerequisite can succeed.
The composition of the skewed distribution:
Sowell does not enumerate the prerequisites of success explicitly, but he places particular emphasis on will, capacity, and obstacles.
In Sowell’s view, the will to succeed and the capacity to achieve success are what confer meaning on all the other prerequisites.
The fact is that even when we possess some, many, or most of the prerequisites for a particular achievement, we may achieve nothing at all; and when the missing factor or factors are finally added to the set, we may suddenly achieve something astonishing. This is what we mean when we say that some people squander their talent, and that for others everything is ready but the east wind — Zhuge Liang at Red Cliffs, with the fleet prepared and only the weather withheld.
Beyond will and capacity, obstacles are also a prerequisite of success — but removing an obstacle does not automatically produce success, just as the Qing dynasty did not become today’s great Eastern power the moment it “opened its doors.”
All success is the reward for possessing every prerequisite simultaneously; obstacles are only a necessary, not a sufficient, condition among them.
Conversely, however, creating obstacles is generally sufficient to hand an existing success to someone else, or to carry us further from success — Ming China abandoning the ocean in the fifteenth century and slipping toward the developing world; Hitler driving out the Jews in the Second World War and losing the atomic bomb.
We are habituated to interpreting the world through vision. But reality is never matched by expectations formed on a defective understanding of probability — often it is very far from them. Interpreting through vision and understanding through probability are two entirely different perspectives, and each grows at the expense of the other.
Vision is set out at length in Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions; here I will summarize it as a perception that arises prior to any theory expressed through logical relations and verified against fact.
Vision is a disposition toward a mode of conduct — a disposition governing how we act and how we evaluate. Consider the divergent attitudes people hold toward equality, liberty, and power: some prize procedural equality, others care about compensating for outcomes.
The mechanism by which a vision forms is difficult to articulate, and may even be self-contradictory. Sometimes we hold that my fate is mine to determine, not heaven’s; at other times we hold that the sky is the limit.
It is precisely our vision-based interpretation that covertly leads us to seek evidence and facts confirming that our vision is correct (analogous to confirmation bias) — when in reality the world contains a great quantity of divergent, even falsifying, facts and evidence, which we sometimes deliberately avoid.
But whatever the facts, those interpretations rendered and varnished by ideology are propagating freely through society and inflaming people’s enthusiasm.
All of it rests on our defective grasp of probability and statistics, and on our disinclination to test claims against fact.
It is precisely under this dissemination — wrapped in “correct” ideology — that we have long grown accustomed to indignation and agitation over injustices remote from us, while overlooking the inequalities beside us, and even those originating in ourselves: the average IQ of twins is lower than that of singletons; average IQ in large families ranks by birth order.
But this is emphatically not a denial that the world contains a vast amount of inequality. One might even say there is scarcely a corner of this world illuminated by equality. The book observes that we constantly hear the frequency of upward social mobility used to measure the abundance of opportunity — but what we do not see is that not everyone appears to be striving upward equally. We have not only failed to see the unequal effort within the statistical population; we have seen a great many of the obstacles to upward mobility that we were willing to see.
A large portion of the book is in fact devoted to falsifying the claim that inequality is produced by genes and by prejudicial treatment. Yet Sowell does not neglect the inequality in social development produced by the highly skewed distribution of naturally endowed resources. Geographic factors did play an important role in the pattern of economic development across the past several centuries — terrain, climate, soil, and draft animals affecting transport costs, the scale of society, communication and interaction, and labor productivity.
Geography is no less innately given than genetics; nor can we force a one-to-one correspondence between inequality in natural endowment and the severe inequality of subsequent social development.
As reality attests, the places historically most suited to agricultural civilization did not, as one might expect, give birth to agricultural societies earliest. As Adam Smith observes in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, toward those distant from us — those living near fault lines, or in regions of frequent tornadoes or lightning — most people can only express sympathy for the inequality they suffer, or express nothing at all.
On the relationship between geography and unequal social development, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel offers a finer-grained analysis; Sowell, in Wealth, Poverty and Politics, discusses beyond geography the influence of man-made obstacles on the unequal distribution of social wealth.
Still, it bears emphasizing: geography is only one prerequisite among the causes of inequality, and may well not be the decisive one.
Finally, a line that moved me deeply:
Granting all people equal rights and equal treatment does not mean equal performance; it in fact guarantees unequal performance and unequal outcomes.
I only answer from what is written on this site.
Type a few words — I will show you where it says so.