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Hello, everybody.

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I'm honored to be here to talk to you,

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and what I'm going to talk about today
is luck and justice

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and the relation between them.

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Some years ago,

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a former student of mine called me

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to talk about his daughter.

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It turns out his daughter
was a high school senior,

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was seriously interested
in applying to Swarthmore,

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where I taught,

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and he wanted to get my sense
of whether she would get in.

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Swarthmore is an extremely
hard school to get into.

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So I said, "Well, tell me about her."

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And he told me about her,

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what her grades were like,
her board scores,

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her extracurricular activities.

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And she just sounded like a superstar,

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wonderful, wonderful kid.

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So I said, "She sounds fabulous.

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She sounds like just the kind of student

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that Swarthmore would love to have."

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And so he said, "Well, does that mean
that she'll get in?"

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And I said, "No.

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There just aren't enough spots
in the Swarthmore class

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for everybody who's good.

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There aren't enough spots at Harvard
or Yale or Princeton or Stanford.

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There aren't enough spots
at Google or Amazon or Apple.

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There aren't enough spots
at the TED Conference.

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There are an awful lot of good people,

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and some of them
are not going to make it."

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So he said, "Well, what are we
supposed to do?"

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And I said, "That's a very good question."

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What are we supposed to do?

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And I know what colleges
and universities have done.

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In the interest of fairness,

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what they've done is
they've kept ratcheting up the standards

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because it doesn't seem fair
to admit less qualified people

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and reject better qualified people,

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so you just keep raising
the standards higher and higher

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until they're high enough
that you can admit

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only the number of students
that you can fit.

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And this violates a lot of people's sense
of what justice and fairness is.

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People in American society
have different opinions

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about what it means
to say that some sort of process is just,

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but I think there's one thing
that pretty much everyone agrees on,

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that in a just system, a fair system,

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people get what they deserve.

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And what I was telling my former student

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is that when it comes
to college admissions,

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it just isn't true that people
get what they deserve.

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Some people get what they deserve,
and some people don't,

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and that's just the way it is.

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When you ratchet up requirements
as colleges have done,

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what you do is you create
a crazy competition

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among high school kids,

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because it's not adequate to be good,

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it's not adequate to be good enough,

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you have to be better than everybody else
who is also applying.

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And what this has done,

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or what this has contributed to,

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is a kind of epidemic
of anxiety and depression

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that is just crushing our teenagers.

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We are wrecking a generation
with this kind of competition.

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As I was thinking about this,

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it occurred to me
there's a way to fix this problem.

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And here's what we could do:

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when people apply to college,

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we distinguish between the applicants
who are good enough to be successful

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and the ones who aren't,

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and we reject the ones who aren't
good enough to be successful,

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and then we take all of the others,
and we put their names in a hat,

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and we just pick them out at random

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and admit them.

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In other words, we do
college admissions by lottery,

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and maybe we do job offers
at tech companies by lottery,

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and -- perish the thought --

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maybe we even make decisions
about who gets invited to talk at TED

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by lottery.

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Now, don't misunderstand me,

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a lottery like this is not
going to eliminate the injustice.

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There will still be plenty of people
who don't get what they deserve.

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But at least it's honest.

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It reveals the injustice for what it is
instead of pretending otherwise,

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and it punctures the incredible
pressure balloon

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that our high school kids
are now living under.

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So why is it that this perfectly
reasonable proposal,

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if I do say so myself,

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doesn't get any serious discussion?

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I think I know why.

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I think it's that we hate the idea

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that really important things in life
might happen by luck or by chance,

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that really important things in our lives
are not under our control.

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I hate that idea.

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It's not surprising
that people hate that idea,

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but it simply is the way things are.

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First of all, college admissions
already is a lottery.

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It's just that the admissions officers
pretend that it isn't.

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So let's be honest about it.

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And second,

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I think if we appreciated
that it was a lottery,

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it would also get us to acknowledge
the importance of good fortune

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in almost every one of our lives.

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Take me.

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Almost all the most significant
events in my life have occurred,

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to a large degree,

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as a result of good luck.

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When I was in seventh grade,
my family left New York

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and went to Westchester County.

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Right at the beginning of school,

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I met a lovely young girl
who became my friend,

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then she became my best friend,

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then she became my girlfriend

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and then she became my wife.

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Happily, she's been my wife now

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for 52 years.

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I had very little to do with this.
This was a lucky accident.

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I went off to college,

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and in my first semester, I signed up
for a class in introduction to psychology.

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I didn't even know what psychology was,

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but it fit into my schedule
and it met requirements,

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so I took it.

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And by luck, the class was taught

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by a superstar introductory
psychology teacher, a legend.

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Because of that, I became
a psychology major.

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Went off to graduate school.

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I was finishing up.

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A friend of mine who taught
at Swarthmore decided

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he didn't want to be a professor anymore,

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and so he quit to go to medical school.

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The job that he occupied opened up,

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I applied for it, I got it,

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the only job I've ever applied for.

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I spent 45 years teaching at Swarthmore,

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an institution that had an enormous impact
on the shape that my career took.

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And to just give one last example,

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I was giving a talk about
some of my work in New York,

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and there was somebody in the audience
who came up to me after my talk.

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He introduced himself.

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He said, "My name is Chris.

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Would you like to give a talk at TED?"

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And my response was, "What's TED?"

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Well, I mean, he told me,

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and TED then wasn't what it is now.

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But in the intervening years,

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the talks I've given at TED
have been watched

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by more than 20 million people.

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So the conclusion is, I'm a lucky man.

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I'm lucky about my marriage.

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I'm lucky about my education.

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I'm lucky about my career.

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And I'm lucky to have had a platform
and a voice at something like TED.

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Did I deserve the success I've had?

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Sure I deserve that success,

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just as you probably deserve your success.

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But lots of people also deserve
successes like ours

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who haven't had it.

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So do people get what they deserve?

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Is society just?

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Of course not.

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Working hard and playing by the rules
is just no guarantee of anything.

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If we appreciate the inevitability
of this kind of injustice

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and the centrality of good fortune,

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we might ask ourselves

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what responsibilities do we have

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to the people we are now celebrating
as heroes in this time of the pandemic

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when a serious illness
befalls their family

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to make sure that they remain whole
and their lives aren't ruined

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by the cost of dealing with the illness?

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What do we owe people who struggle,

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work hard and are less lucky than we are?

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About a half century ago,

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the philosopher John Rawls wrote a book
called "A Theory of Justice,"

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and in that book, he introduced a concept
that he called "the veil of ignorance."

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The question he posed was:

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If you didn't know what your position
in society was going to be,

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what kind of a society
would you want to create?

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And what he suggested

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is that when we don't know
whether we're going to enter society

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at the top or at the bottom,

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what we want is a society
that is pretty damn equal,

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so that even the unlucky

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will be able to live decent,
meaningful and satisfying lives.

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So bring this back, all of you lucky,
successful people, to your communities,

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and do what you can to make sure
that we honor and take care of

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people who are just as deserving
of success as we are,

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but just not as lucky.

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Thank you.