Social Class and Luck: Some Lessons from Gambler's Ruin and Branching Processes
| Date | 01 March 1997 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00070 |
| Author | Alexander T. Coram |
| Published date | 01 March 1997 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Social Class and Luck: Some Lessons from
Gambler's Ruin and Branching Processes
ALEXANDER T. CORAM*
University of Western Australia
Social class, understood here in terms of wealth holdings, and questions about
the extent of mobility between classes, has received an enormous amount of
attention. The most striking omission from the literature on mobility, however,
is an analysis of the role of luck. This is unfortunate because one way to look at
life in market societies would be to treat it as a series of compulsory gambles.
The notion of gambles, or bets, can be used to cover such things as the choice of
a career, investments in the stock market or in a business as well as choice of a
partner and location of a home. It can also be used to cover decisions about the
risk of the occurrence of other events that aect the capacity of individuals to
accumulate wealth. An example would be engaging in a course of action that
would depend on not having a road accident, or a downturn in health, in some
speci®ed period. The notion that these gambles are compulsory is intended to
capture some aspects of the instability of the modern world. Where life chances
depend increasingly on the market, and are subject to constant and unpredict-
able changes, all individuals are compelled to make bets as part of normal
existence. For example, individuals can choose one career or another, or no
career, but they must place their bet on something. If so, some obvious ques-
tions are: What is the eect of luck on the capacity of individuals to accumulate
wealth? How does luck aect dierent classes? Does luck have any interest for
debates about openness, desert and the availability of opportunities in market
societies? Some aspects of these questions will be considered in this paper.
The answer to questions about the eect of luck on individuals with dierent
amounts of wealth, and on the accumulation of wealth, turns out to be complex
and unexpected. To get some idea of these complications, consider the follow-
ing two positions.
The ®rst position is the belief that luck treats everyone equally and that
individuals would get, roughly, the same multiple of their original holdings
when faced with the same gambles. This is based on the intuition that, where
gambles are frequent, `things will soon balance themselves out' and the actual
value will converge to the expected value.1This seems to be the popular, or
common sense, account.2It implies, for example, that, if each coin toss
#Political Studies Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
* I am grateful to Bob Goodin, Jeremy Moon, Campbell Sharman, Maura Hannon, Bruce
Headey and anonymous readers from Political Studies for comments and suggestions.
1R. Goodin, Reasons for Welfare (Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 294 fn. 27.
2Samuelson calls this the popular view. P. Samuelson, `The
N
pLaw and Repeated Risk Taking'
in T. Anderson et al. (eds), Probability, Statistics and Mathematics (San Diego CA, Academic,
1989). The ®fteen or so colleagues I asked also held this view.
Political Studies (1997), XLV, 66± 77
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