The crazy season is officially upon me: two boys in baseball (same team, thankfully), JV soccer, 8-year-old soccer, 5-year-old soccer, track, piano, dance, end-of-school-year stuff . . . and that little thing I call "my job." I'll have to lean on my notebooks to get script together every day of the week.
In economics, the "luck versus work" dispute has been raging for years. The luck proponents incline to view humans as victims or beneficiaries of circumstances–of birth, inheritance, natural endowment. The work proponents incline to view humans as rational agents that make their own beds.
Related debate has raged for years in other disciplines, such as psychology ("heredity versus environment") and sociology ("nature versus nurture").
The debate swings back and forth, at time favoring the luck/heredity/nature proponents, at other times favoring the work/environment/nurture folks. At the present time, I think most people are (sanely) thinking that both elements play a crucial role in an individual's success and happiness.
Whatever the discipline, it is wholly inadequate to deal with the problem because it transcends their disciplines' tools. The problem isn't a psychological or economical one. Though it has an effect on those disciplines, the problem itself is rooted in the very nature of things, which is in turn tied into primordial facts of creation, which in turn implicates divinity itself.
The problem, in other words, is the province of philosophy and, ultimately, theology–the queen of the sciences, to quote the Schoolman.
What is luck, heredity, and nature, after all? Combined with a mere dash of divine intervention, you have "destiny." And "destiny" is just one prefix and syllable away from "pre-destination," the heresy of those who put too much emphasis on the luck side.
And the work side? It looks a lot like free will (even the nurture/environment aspects of the work side imply free will, albeit of the inter-generational sort). And free will deprived of all luck and heredity–deprived of all grace–resembles the heresy of Pelagianism.
The whole thing is ultimately a mystery, of course. It's part of that weird primordial criss-cross of existence that gives rise to one paradox after another, and the academics who flail away at the issue with the jargon and tools of their disciplines are hopeless mismatched. They might as well try to capture the ocean in a jar.
