Which trio better understands wealth creation? Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg and Big Short author Michael Lewis? Or Victorian showman PT Barnum, virginal chanteuse Madonna and TV oilman Bobby Ewing? Yes, out of Dallas.

If you chose the first three, because you admire their entrepreneurial skills, I have some bad news. All of them claim their wealth is, in some way, down to luck. Two recent books — The Wealth Elite by Rainer Zitelmann and The Geometry of Wealth by Brian Portnoy — suggest there might be something in this. Gates, when asked the secret of his success by author Malcolm Gladwell, said simply: “I was very lucky.” Similarly, Zuckerberg told Facebook Live viewers: “You don’t get to be successful like this just by being hard-working or having a good idea?.?.?.?you have to get lucky.” Lewis even urged Princeton graduates to “recognise that if you have had success, you have also had luck”.

Academics elsewhere also cite felicity as causality. When Swiss sociologists interviewed 100 wealthy individuals in 2009, many were “willing to ascribe much of their success to luck”. In a 2015 study of 160 German entrepreneurs and corporate leaders, Roland Hiemann concluded that “Captain Happenstance” might be a suitable name for “a majority”. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian psychologist who identified the concept of “flow”, found the same thing in his 1996 work Creativity “When we asked creative persons what explains their success, one of the most frequent answers — perhaps the most frequent one — was that they were lucky.”