Consider the second helping. It is a small thing, and small things are where habits live. Institutions know all this, of course, which is why the second helping is so rarely left to chance. None of this is new. Adam Smith noticed most of it, and then the profession spent two centuries forgetting. The point is not that people are foolish. The point is that luck is expensive, and we economise on it like everything else.
What the evidence shows
The strange thing about the second helping is not that it exists but that it works, most of the time, for most people. What looks like luck from the outside is usually something simpler from the inside: tiredness, a deadline, a wish not to look foolish. The honest conclusion is uncomfortable for reformers: people are not waiting to be corrected. A better account of luck would begin with the ordinary case rather than the laboratory one.
