When I heard the President talk about the teacher, the roads, bridges, other infrastructure, and just being an American being partially responsible for every business success I knew what he was talking about. Talent and hard work is important but never enough. Moreover you never know what other incidentals are responsible for one’s job or success. In fact sometimes one’s success or opportunity comes from something completely unrelated.
I remember thinking that the first job I got as a senior programmer/analyst for a major corporation was because of this wonderful FORTRAN program I had written for ARCO to simulate the stabilization of a ship in heavy waves and wind. Not until I was leaving the company did my boss tell me why she hired me for a job above my “qualification level” at the time. I remember the department head calling me into his office and saying, his manager wanted to hire me. He then said this “You have six months to prove yourself. If you do not work out I do not want to hear a damn thing about affirmative action”. Of course after 2 months they came to my office after I completed a 6 month project in two months, and told me probation was over. Anyway, my boss told me I was actually hired because of the determination I showed during school delivering pizzas, being a cook at a pizza restaurant, and managing a pizza restaurant many times 40 hours a week while taking on a full engineering load. It had little to do with what I cherished most in my education or the design methodology projects I had completed.
The same is true with many of the businesses that have joined the dishonest position Mitt Romney is taking on the President’s statement as he marches out business after business stating they created their company’s all on their own. As seen in my previous blog and in news elsewhere, many if not most of them have taken government subsidies, loans, and/or government business throughout the lifetime of their businesses.
One cannot allow the political spin and misinformation to devalue the true worth of the individuals as a collective that comprise the middle class, society, and with that the government’s role in the success of all businesses. After all absent those paying taxes to support a huge military, our mega corporations would be unable to conduct international business. Absent our taxes to support roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, business would not get the customers. Absent our publicly funded educational system, business would not have employees capable of conducting business. Most importantly absent the middle class’ will to purchase or their ability to purchase, there would be no business.
There is a necessary symbiotic relationship between business, government, and the individual. That is what makes a society. Giving a bias to anyone but the individual breaks the system and we are currently living through the result of no doing so. It is time for us to rebalance. You must do that with your vote in November. The article below is an article I found interesting. It should help dispel any notions that success is absolute or absolutely dependent on one’s own capabilities.
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August 4, 2012
Luck vs. Skill: Seeking the Secret of Your Success
By ROBERT H. FRANK
THERE may be no topic that more reliably divides liberals and conservatives than the relationship between success and luck. Many conservatives celebrate market success as an almost inevitable consequence of talent and effort. Liberals, by contrast, like to remind us that even talented people who work hard sometimes fall on hard times through no fault of their own.
It’s easy to see why each side is wary of the other’s position. Conservatives, for example, understandably fret that encouraging people to view life as a lottery might encourage them just to sit back and hope for the best. Liberals, for their part, worry that encouraging people to claim an unrealistically large share of the credit for their own success might make them more reluctant to aid the less fortunate.
Both sets of concerns have important implications for public policy, so it would be good to know more about how important luck actually is. Unfortunately, it’s an inherently tough question to answer. But recent experiments suggest that chance events may influence market outcomes far more heavily than previously thought.
The sociologists Duncan J. Watts, Matthew Sagalnik and Peter Dodds carried out some of these experiments, which Mr. Watts described in his superb 2011 book, “Everything Is Obvious* (*Once You Know the Answer).” Their work focuses on online markets, but it has much broader implications. It suggests that although market success does depend on the quality of a product, the link is extremely variable and uncertain. Even the best contestant in a product category may fail, and even the worst one sometimes wins. And for an overwhelming majority of contestants in the intermediate-quality range, they found success to be largely a matter of chance.
The researchers invited subjects to a temporary, experimental Web site called Music Lab, which listed 48 recordings by little-known indie bands. In the control version of the experiment, subjects could download any of the songs free if they agreed to give a quality rating after listening.
