Salmon talks about Anne Leibowitz who lost millions. Her credit was so bad, her applications for an American Express credit card had been repeatedly denied at the time when American Express offered to pay her big bucks to become their spokesperson in a new ad campaign.
Yglesias responds:
To me the interesting thing goes beyond hedge fund rules and obsequious interviews in financial media, to a much more general phenomenon of the enormous general social, cultural, and intellectual prestige accorded to rich people. In this vein, Leibowitz is not a good example, since obviously she’s a rich person second and a famous photographer first and her work can be judged on its own photo-centric terms.
But in general it seems to me that we pay extraordinarily little attention to the giant role played by luck and happenstance in determining who becomes a super-successful businessman. Bill Gates, for example, clearly knows something about software and something about business. But there are lots of people who fit that bill. There’s only one Gates because it’s in the nature of things that only one firm gets to write the operating system that, thanks to strong network effects, becomes dominant and lets you start reaping monopoly profits. Nothing wrong with it, that’s life. But in general, as a society we tend to treat successful businessmen as if they were omniscient central planners who’d gotten rich through their powers of clairvoyance. In fact, the whole point of having businessmen instead of central planners is that nobody’s that omniscient—we let some flowers bloom and some chips fall and life moves on. But there’s no particular reason to believe that the ex post winners have enormous insights. If you hang around a casino, on any given night someone’s going to make money playing roulette, but that doesn’t mean you should ask him about his roulette strategy and it certainly doesn’t mean you should ask his opinion about public policy issues far outside his area of focus.
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