What do you think? Success: is it luck or is it hard work?

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how individual characteristics and national-level variables affect perceptions toward whether individual success depends on luck and connections or hard work. Drawing on five waves of World Values Survey (WVS) data on more than 175,000 respondents in 85 countries, we find that demographic factors and socioeconomic variables such as age, gender, income, and employment status are strongly associated with an individual’s view on luck versus hard work. For example, women are more likely to view luck as the primary factor determining success in the long run. In addition, individuals in countries with better macroeconomic conditions measured by GDP per capita and its growth rate seem to associate success more with luck than with hard work compared to individuals in other countries. Our results from multilevel ordered logistic regressions also suggest that differences in personal traits account for approximately 90% of the variations in respondents’ perceptions observed in our sample. The remaining 10% is due to differences in various country-level traits other than our GDP controls.

KEYWORDS:

• Individual perceptions
• luck and hard work
• success in the long run
• World Values Survey

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D12
• D19
• D91
• Z13

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Readers are referred to Table 2 of Fisman and O’Neill (2009) for detailed information on the control variables included in their model.

² The probability can be calculated as $\frac{1}{1+exp(-\left(C_m-X\beta \right))}-\frac{1}{1+exp\left(-\left(C_{m-1}-X\beta \right)\right)}$ average across all observations, where m = 1,…,10 and C is the cut point value.