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Should we be thinking about luck differently?

We tend to focus on good or bad fortune, successes and failures. But what about the fact you’re here at all?

At around midday on 19 August 1949, wreathed in thick mist, a British European Airways DC-3 going from Belfast to Manchester flew into a hillside on Saddleworth Moor in the Peak District, near Oldham. And this is only one of the long chain of fortuitous events that led to my existence: my mother being captured by pirates in China and later escaping Shanghai in 1937 under shellfire; my parents meeting during the war; my father closely avoiding plane crashes in the RAF and then nearly dying of tuberculosis. Sir David Spiegelhalter is emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge and author of The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck (Pelican).

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