Robert Frank (Cornell): You are lucky to be successful!

Today my guest is Professor Robert Frank.

Professor Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. 

Professor Frank’s books, which include Choosing the RightPond, Passions Within Reason, Microeconomics and Behavior, Principles of Economics, Luxury Fever, What Price the Moral High Ground, Falling Behind, TheEconomic Naturalist, The Darwin Economy, and Success and Luck, have been translated into 23 languages.

In this episode, we mainly talked about a new book from Prof Frank: Success and Luck.  I asked Prof Frank some very tough questions:

1) What is the benefit for those successful people to recognize the role of luck in their life? I can understand from the perspective of less successful or less wealthy ones, we would be glad to see rich people donate to build a library, a road, or a university, etc, as it is not my money anyway. But for multi-billionaires like Charles Koch, Bill Gates, etc, what value do they get to admit them being lucky?

2) In your book, you mentioned an example of rich people buying unnecessary luxuries. For example, the CEO of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarman, threw a birthday party costing more than a few million dollars. You proposed that a progressive consumption tax would discourage people like him from doing so. My question is: what is wrong with a rich people enjoying his life? He works hard, pays his tax and gets his rewards lawfully. Why should we bother to interfere his personal choice?

3) The Progressive Consumption Tax that you proposed in the book seems to encourage rich people to consume less and save more. What if we are in a period of economic recession, such as 2008/09? 

I hope you enjoy the conversation. 

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