Americans tend to believe that success comes from hard work, determination and little else. That attitude leads, and has led, to a threadbare social safety net and the undue suffering of millions — so why are we still holding on to the idea? Social welfare professor Mark Robert Rank shows how dramatically our lives are shaped by utter randomness. He unpacks how our aversion to the very idea of luck—our need to believe that personal success or failure comes from internal strength or weakness—leads to policies that weaken the social safety net and favor those who, by chance, were born with a leg up. He’s been featured on NPR, NBC Nightly News, the PBS NewsHour, CBS News, CNN, and many others.