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simply assumed to have displayed the appropriate merit, at which point the success effectively becomes a substitute for merit itself. But even more than that, it is merit that cannot be easily questioned. If one believes that the Mona Lisa is a great piece of art because of X, Y, and Z, a knowledgeable disputant can immediately counter with his or her own criteria, or point out other examples that ought to be considered superior. But if one believes instead that the Mona Lisa is a great piece of art simply because it is famous, our pesky disputant can come up with all the objections she desires and we can insist quite reasonably that she must be missing the point. No matter how knowledgably she argues that properties of the Mona Lisa aren’t uniquely special, we cannot help but suspect that something must have been overlooked, because surely if the artwork was not really special, then it wouldn’t be, well, special.

20. See http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/12/best-boss-09_Steven-P-Jobs_HEDB.html.

21. Sometimes even the leaders themselves concede this point—but interestingly they tend to do so only when things are going badly. For example, when the leaders of the four largest investment banks testified before Congress in early 2010, they did not take personal responsibility for the performance of their firms, claiming instead that to have been victims of a “financial tsunami” that had wreaked havoc on the economy. Yet in the years leading up to the crisis, when their firms were making money hand over fist, these same leaders were not turning down their bonuses on the grounds that everyone in their industry was making money, and therefore they shouldn’t be credited with doing anything special. See Khurana (2002) for details, and Wasserman, Anand, and Nohira (2010) for the empirical results on when leadership matters.

22. To quote Khurana directly: “strong social, cultural, and psychological forces lead people to believe in cause-and-effect relationships such as that between corporate leadership and corporate performance. In the United States, the cultural bias towards individualism largely discounts the influence of social, economic, and political forces in human affairs so that accounts of complicated events such as wars and economic cycles reduce the forces behind them to personifications.… This process of exaggerating the ability of individuals to influence immensely complex events is strongly abetted by the media, which fixate the public’s attention on the personal characteristics of leaders at the expense of serious analysis of events” (Khurana 2002, p. 23).

23. As Khurana and other critics are quick to acknowledge, their research does not mean that anyone can be an effective CEO, or that CEO performance is irrelevant. It is certainly possible, for example, for a CEO to destroy tremendous value by making awful or irresponsible decisions. And because avoiding bad decisions can be difficult, even satisfactory performance requires a certain amount of experience, intellect, and leadership ability. Certainly not everyone has the wherewithal to qualify for the job, or the discipline and energy to perform it. Many CEOs are impressive people who work long hours under stressful conditions and carry heavy burdens of responsibility. It’s therefore perfectly reasonable for corporate boards to choose candidates selectively and to compensate them appropriately for their talent and their time. The argument is just that they shouldn’t be selected or compensated on the grounds that their individual performance will have more than a weak influence on the future performance of their firm.

24. For a summary of Rawls’s and Nozick’s arguments, see Sandel (2009). For the original arguments, see Rawls (1971) and Nozick (1974).

25. See DiPrete (2002) for empirical evidence on intergenerational social mobility.

26. See, for example, Herszenhorn (2009) and Kocieniewski (2010).

27. See, for example, Watts (2009).

28. See Watts (2003, Chapter 1) for a detailed discussion of one such cascading failure—the 1996 failure in the western United