Quarter 4 Independent Reading: In-Process Post #2

On Randomness and Fate

In the chapter of Freakonomics on parenting, the authors describe two boys with very different upbringings. One is white and grows up in the Chicago suburbs. He lives in a stable family with devoted parents. His parents and teachers think he's a genius; in fact, he skips a grade. The other boy is black and grows up in Daytona Beach, Florida. His mother abandons him, and his alcoholic father (who will later be convicted of sexual assault) beats him. By his teenage years, he is selling drugs and robbing people.

The first boy seems much more likely to succeed than the second one. Which is why the big reveal at the end of the book is so surprising (or perhaps not surprising, because why would the authors have chosen these examples if they were going to turn out the way we expected?). The second boy, Roland Fryer, becomes a Harvard economist. What about the other boy? In the authors' words: "The white child also made it to Harvard. But soon after, things went badly for him. His name is Ted Kaczynski."

Levitt and Dubner use these examples to illustrate a larger point about parenting: "There is...a huge random effect that rains down on even the best parenting efforts. If you are in any way typical, you have known some intelligent and devoted parents whose child went badly off the rails. You may have also known of the opposite instance, where a child succeeds despite his parents' worst intentions and habits."

I don’t disagree. Certainly Ted Kaczynski is not the only person to ever turn out badly despite being raised under good circumstances; certainly Roland Fryer is not the only person to ever succeed despite being raised under bad circumstances.

My question is this: what does “random” really mean? Maybe humans don’t have free will and this is just a reflection of the human need to feel like you have some control over your fate, but you certainly wouldn’t say the trajectory of your life is random, would you? You could probably list a bunch of things that have shaped your life: your friends growing up, your teachers, the town you grew up in, the college you went to, et cetera. Each of those things altered the way you viewed the world, or offered you an experience or opportunity you might not have had elsewhere. Levitt and Dubner describe how Roland Fryer became an economist: He went to college on an athletic scholarship, realized he wasn’t pro material, decided to apply himself in school, and discovered that he was actually interested in learning. There was a very specific set of factors that led him down that path. Likewise, something must have happened to turn Ted Kaczynski--brilliant, happy adolescent--into the Unabomber. No one has ever figured out what it was, although observers have pointed to his participation in a traumatizing and unethical psychological study at Harvard, the books he read, and his possible mental illness. But it didn’t happen by chance.

I bet I would be a very different person today if it weren’t for the 2003 Chicago Cubs. They made the playoffs that year, and it ignited my obsession with baseball, which soon became an obsession with anything else that involved hitting, throwing, or running. Up to that point I had shown no interest in sports or any other physical activity; my parents worried that I would be a couch potato. After that, I became a jock. I’ve had days where I played two hours of tennis, ran eight miles, and biked 15 or 20 more. Yes, I’m crazy, but I’ve realized that I’m more comfortable on my feet, moving around, than I am sitting still. I think more clearly that way. I’ve thought a lot of deep thoughts on my bike, and not very many on the couch (although I am sitting on the couch as I write this--maybe that’s why it’s taking so long). I’m wired a certain way, and I think you can trace it back to 2003, when I first took an interest in sports. If the Cubs had been terrible that year (as they are almost every year), everything afterward would have been different. Maybe I would have undergone a similar transformation later, for some other reason. It’s hard to say. But again, it wasn’t an accident that I turned out the way I did. A specific event had a clear (at least I think so), long-lasting effect.

However, it would have been hard to predict that effect. Lots of other couch-potato kids my age remained couch potatoes after 2003. For that matter, lots of other young athletes on athletic scholarships never take much interest in the academic side of college, and they end up with no degree and no chance of playing professionally. Roland Fryer was unusual. And the infamous Harvard study didn’t cause any of the participants other than Ted Kaczynski to become terrorists. Different people respond differently to the same experiences, and it’s often hard to know why one person responds one way and another person responds another way. You can chalk it up to fate or God or nature or nurture or whatever you want.

On the individual level, the outcome of a life is not random. But from the perspective of an objective macro-level observer like Levitt, these odd effects are hard to predict, and they tend to even out over a large enough sample. In that sense, yes--life is random.

Maybe if Kaczynski’s parents had done something different, he wouldn’t have become the Unabomber. But that doesn’t mean they did anything wrong. Whatever they did that helped shape his personality (and being his parents, they must have impacted him in some way) might have shaped a different child in a different way.

Last summer, my dad and I went out to dinner in Philadelphia with one of his friends from college at Penn. We were coming through town on our big college tour of the Northeast, so of course the conversation turned to college. Somehow we arrived at this question: What would have happened if they had gone to different schools? First, there was the obvious fact that my dad and Eric would have likely never met if they had gone to different schools, and we therefore wouldn’t have been at that table having dinner. But I liked Eric’s answer: “I can’t say whether it would have been better or worse, but it would have been different.”

You never know how the decision you make today might change your life tomorrow. That’s kind of scary--you could be messing up your future and you don’t even know it--but couldn’t it also be liberating? There’s a lot you don’t know, and a lot you can’t control, so why sweat it? Just roll with the punches and try to make the best of whatever life throws at you. What else are you supposed to do?