luck

Luck names the part of life that people cannot control or predict: the outcomes that seem to arrive by chance, for better or worse. Philosophers have long argued about whether luck is a real force or only a label for events whose causes we do not see. Probability theory treats it as the second view would suggest, describing chance events in terms of odds, while everyday language often speaks of luck as something a person has, keeps, or runs out of.

Many ancient cultures personified luck. The Greeks honored Tyche, goddess of fortune, and the Romans worshipped Fortuna, often shown holding a cornucopia for abundance and a ship's rudder for steering human fate. She was also linked with a turning wheel. In The Consolation of Philosophy, written around 524 while he awaited execution, the Roman statesman Boethius described Fortune turning her wheel so that those at the top fall and those at the bottom rise. The rota Fortunae became a favorite image of medieval art and survives in the name of the television game Wheel of Fortune.

Beliefs about lucky and unlucky numbers vary widely. In Chinese, the word for eight, ba, sounds close to fa, meaning to prosper, so the number is prized in phone numbers, license plates, and addresses; the Beijing Olympic Games opened at 8 p.m. on 8 August 2008. Four, by contrast, sounds like the word for death in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and many buildings in East Asia skip the fourth floor. In much of Europe and North America, seven is considered lucky and thirteen unlucky. Charms such as the four-leaf clover, the horseshoe, and the Japanese beckoning cat, maneki-neko, express the same wish to tip chance in one's favor.

Psychologists have studied why some people consider themselves lucky. The British psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire spent about a decade on the question, publishing The Luck Factor in 2003. In one experiment, he asked volunteers to count the photographs in a newspaper. Inside, a large message announced that there were 43 photographs and told readers to stop counting. Self-described lucky people tended to notice it; unlucky people often missed it. Wiseman concluded that lucky people are more relaxed and open to opportunity, follow their intuition, expect good outcomes, and turn setbacks to their advantage, habits that can be learned.

Luck also raises moral questions. In 1976 the philosophers Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel published papers on what they called moral luck, the problem that people are judged partly on outcomes they did not control. Two drivers may be equally careless, but only the one whose path is crossed by a child is blamed for a death. Such cases show how deeply ideas of luck are woven into law, ethics, and the way people explain success and failure.