Importance of Understanding

Everyone is born into some set of opportunities. Refer to such a set of opportunities as the ‘opportunity set’. A person’s opportunity set first is defined by circumstances of parents, then by his or her environment. Culture, tastes, propensities, idiosyncrasies, biases, all are influenced to one degree or another by parents and the environment — siblings, neighbors, customs, weather etc.

As a person develops, formal education provides a forum for refining of the opportunity set. If the parents are medical doctors, formal education provides opportunity for development of a career in banking, engineering, etc. This feature of formal education probably is lost on many who, surrounded by formal education all of their lives, do not consciously realize that, absent formal education, unless taken in by an uncle who happens to be otherwise, children of doctors only would have capacity for becoming doctors,

But then, while parents remain alive, who prefers to be raised by an uncle?

Opportunity sets come with advantages and drawbacks that are naturally occurring, advantages and drawbacks that cannot be obviated, as such, only can be harnessed or addressed. A person born into a rich family may lack capacity for dealing with challenges that reside outside of context of money, this because he or she never…