Can’t Buy Me Luck: The Role of Serendipity in the Beatles’ Success
Imagine there were no Beatles—or that there was no Beatlemania anyway and that the lads from Liverpool were just another band that never got a record deal or that split up before they hit it big. That is the premise Harvard University professor Cass R. Sunstein ponders in an entertaining and thought-provoking essay to be published in September in the first issue of the Journal of Beatles Studies.
Because history is only run once, Sunstein cannot prove the theory that the Beatles got by with a little help from their friends. But that is not really the point. He uses the entertaining example of Beatlemania to explore the effects of early social influence in other realms. A lot of success in business, politics, academia and most other professions owes much to early opportunities that enable subsequent success. “Serendipity is a little bit of a black box,” Sunstein says.
That process, as sketched out by Sunstein, includes “informational cascades” , “reputational cascades” , “network effects” and “group polarization” . Literary fame turns out to be equally fickle. Novelists and poets we now consider iconic, such as Jane Austen and John Keats, were not so highly regarded in their lifetime. Austen made a little money from her novels, but a similar author, Mary Brunton, was far more successful. Keats died young and mostly unheralded. Then Austen was propelled to enduring fame by a biography. And Brunton is now mostly forgotten.
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