I’ve got this on my desk.
The options are:
1 Ask Mom
2 Buy
3 Sell
4 Go For It
5 No
6 Pray
7 Yes
8 Maybe
9 Fire Someone
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Knowing my luck I would end up going from Oxford to London via Plymouth and Inverness.
I do have a set of polyhedron dice on my desk for making decisions that are of low importance though.
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Mornington Crescent, anyone?
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Except the Midwest maybe, you’ll just end up in a cornfield.
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I dunno, the circumstances of birth are completely random chance, while exhibiting the strongest correlation to life outcomes- if you’re born into a wealthy educated family, you stand a ~90%+ chance of dying wealthy and educated. Roughly same odds or maybe higher if you’re born into a poor family.
So choices can certainly have an impact, but the dominant variable in life is birth. I also suspect that random encounters play a larger role in successful outcomes for non-wealthy people (wealthy people don’t need to rely on these encounters because they are baked in via networking.)
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I"ll put that under the category of “things that I didn’t know existed and now I have a burning desire for”.
Is it as heavy and satisfying as it looks?
You may be correct. However, when we look at the number of wealthy people in comparison to the number who are not, data concerning outcomes for wealthy people act more as outliers than they do a statistically significant trend. In other words, basing a conclusion on such a tiny fraction of humanity may not be a valid way to view the entire data set.
The big ball is about the size of a golf ball and seems massive. I’d say the whole thing is about 500g. The base is rubberized.
It makes for a good paperweight or fidgeting toy.
No, I can’t remember where I got it. Possibly in a novelty shop, years and years ago.
Cool! Apparently Amazon will sell me one for $10.
Attempts to resist
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Perhaps I I didn’t make my point clear by providing distinction for the datasets, so I’ll just eliminate that- In the US, your odds of dying within the same social class to which you were born are roughly 90%. The numbers improve mildly if you have the good sense to be born in, say, Norway. They get worse if your are foolish enough to be born in Haiti.
The remaining ~10% you have to work with to escape your class is highly confounded, so determining which factors most greatly affect it is extremely difficult. My suspicion is that random encounters have a significant role in moving that needle, at least as great as anything else you might ‘intentionally’ act on.
As an aside, this is partly why I believe that attempts to “level the playing field” within a capitalist system produce minuscule/temporary beneficial results- the rungs of the ladder may inch closer here or there, but if your arms can only reach three feet does it really matter if the next rung is 4’6” or 5’? Either way it’s out of reach.
This book is as much a shibboleth as Ayn Rand. But instead of “emotionally crippled pre-teen” it’s “entitled douchebag.”
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