"What is the converse to "luck" in your argument? Is it effort, or work, or something like that?" There are more inputs than hard work and luck. An obvious exa

"What is the converse to "luck" in your argument? Is it effort, or work, or something like that?" There are more inputs than hard work and luck. An obvious example would be the decisions one makes in life. For instance, having a child at 20 years old, outside of a stable relationship has long been known to have different results than having a child at 25 in a stable relationship. Decisions themselves have lots of inputs, so it's a complex issue. For instance, family and culture have a big impact on decisions, so those with different backgrounds would be expected to make different decisions, and therefore have different results. It would be quite a surprise if different families and cultures produced the same results, after all. Note that I'm certainly not saying that cultures are better or worse than other cultures. They may have different measures of success, for one thing; and even on one measure (like financial success) the rankings of various cultures might change radically if the environment changes. I guess you could say that it's "luck" to be born into a family and culture that encourage the kind of decisions that are best for the environment you're in, or something like that. But that just doesn't seem to usefully inform any policy proposal. If bad decisions are a major factor in bad outcomes, it might be more effective to encourage better decisions than to try to deal with the consequences after bad decisions are already made.