There is a simple formula for getting ahead. Follow it and a good many of your wishes will come your way.

Here are a few of the millions of instances when people ignore it.

The auto unions ignore it. Yes, they have given back some of their benefits. Yes, incoming UAW workers make less than older workers. That is a concession.

But the UAW has resisted enough that it still costs Detroit automakers an extra $16 an hour in wages and benefits to build cars here. That is, $16 an hour more than Toyota pays American workers to build cars here.

And so Ford is investing $3 billion in Mexico to build new Fiestas. Who can blame them? Could the UAW have kept these jobs in Detroit? Good chance, but it would have had to do something it never does. It would have had to ask Ford what the UAW could do to help Ford. Instead, it asks what it can do to help the UAW. In other words, it thinks of benefitting itself instead of thinking of how it might benefit Ford.

A few years ago the UAW had 1.5 million members. Today, only about 500,000, and falling.

Printers unions did the same years ago, when there were far more newspapers. They thought only of their own interests. They never asked how they could help the newspapers. The papers were their enemies, they reckoned. And so their newspapers went out of business, by the dozens.