Robert H. “Bob” Frank teaches economics at Cornell and is the author of a dozen books, including the one that caught my eye for this week’s topic: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.
Bob cares a great deal about recognizing luck’s role in our success because doing so, he argues, would make us all more grateful, happy, and generous. He also cares because without the “lucky” proximity of an ambulance one cold November morning, he wouldn’t have survived the heart attack that laid him out on the tennis court in Ithaca, NY a few years back. But survive he did and he forged on to continue teaching and writing about status, ambition, spending, social signaling, and the evolutionary traits that lead to such behavior.
The Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management Emeritus at Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business, Bob’s other books include Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, and Principles of Macroeconomics, the textbook he co-authored with former Federal Reserve Chair, Ben Bernanke.
Bob’s writing has appeared in top publications and academic journals, including The Atlantic, Journal of Economics, Journal of Public Economics, American Economic Review, The American Prospect, and Chronicle of Higher Education.
He is a regular contributor to the Economic View column in the New York Times. Bob received his undergraduate degree from Georgia Tech and his MA and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He has taught economics at Cornell since 1972.
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