Bad Luck

President Obama is on a bus tour of America's heartland, explaining how his economic policies really are working, despite persistently high unemployment, a skyrocketing deficit and downgrade of the country's credit rating.

He told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa,

We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again. But over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.

Bad luck. Hmmm. The late author Robert Heinlein had some thoughts on "bad luck."

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”