This literature review unifies findings on luck's impact on life outcomes, emphasizing unpredictability in achievement.
There is an emerging recognition among sociological theorists that luck may play a substantial role in life course achievement. There is also a nascent empirical literature that finds life outcomes to be unpredictable and unexpected life events to be a likely cause. A third literature of causal event studies provides thousands of point estimates of the life course consequences of random events. This review brings these literatures together under a unified framework.
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Rijt et al. (2026) studied this question.
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