A poverty expert reveals how truly random the world is—including how economic inequality is experienced—and how we can learn to acknowledge chance and appreciate it.

It’s comforting to think that we can be successful because we work hard, climb ladders, and get what we deserve, but each of us has been profoundly touched by randomness. Chance is shown to play a crucial role in shaping outcomes across history, throughout the natural world, and in our everyday lives. In The Random Factor, Mark Robert Rank draws from a wealth of evidence, including interviews and research, to explain how luck and chance play out and reveals how we can use these lessons to guide our personal lives and public policies.

The Random Factor traverses luck from macro to micro, from events like the Cuban Missile Crisis to our personal encounters and relationships. From his perspective as a scholar of poverty, Rank also delves into the class and race dynamics of chance, emphasizing the stark disparities it brings to light. This transformative book prompts a new understanding of the twists and turns in our daily lives and encourages readers to fully appreciate the surprising world of randomness in which we live.

About the Author

Mark Robert Rank is Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at Washington University in St. Louis. He has received numerous awards for his scholarship and books, and his research has been reported in a wide range of national and international media.

Contents

1 The Wheel of Fortune

I. The World Around Us
2 The Arc of History
3 The Natural World
4 Luck in Everyday Life

II. The Patterns of Our Lives
5 The Lottery of Birth
6 Who, What, Where, and When
7 Shortcuts, Detours, and Forks in the Road

III. Lessons Learned
8 Retooling Policies
9 Reflecting and Assessing
10 Our Unpredictable Companion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"The Random Factor is a fantastic read for anyone interested in how luck, chance, and serendipity shape our daily lives and unequal outcomes. With compelling examples always at hand, Mark Robert Rank deftly brings together insights from a wide range of studies and everyday experiences to show the underappreciated role that randomness plays in all aspects of social life. Accessible and entertaining, the book provides a valuable new perspective on contemporary inequality."—Michael Sauder, Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa

"Is it better to be lucky than to be good? Sociologist Mark Robert Rank's engaging and highly readable The Random Factor considers the importance of luck and chance in grand human affairs and individual life outcomes. From the accident of birth to why some musicians are highly successful while others, equally talented, languish in obscurity; from the choices of natural selection to the margin between winning and losing in sports, Rank takes the reader on a lively, entertaining, and informative tour of how randomness affects our lives for good and ill. . . . Both entertaining and informative."—Gerald Early, Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters, Washington University in St. Louis

“As social scientists, we focus on finding out what predicts what. Most of the time, we can model twenty or thirty percent of how variable A is related to variable B. But what of the remainder, the seventy or eighty percent that we can’t predict? That’s the magic spot The Random Factor targets, the parts of life's realm that we cannot predict but that make all the difference.”—Mimi Chapman, Frank A. Daniels Distinguished Professor for Human Service Policy Information, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews