In my last semester at the University of Tokyo, I decided to take the Intensive Nihongo class. In one of our praxis sessions, our class was tasked to discourse on what we believed to be “the most important driver of success in life.” We had to choose between 勉強 (benkyouor studies, diligence), 運 (un or luck), and お金 (okane or money). My classmates talked about how education is essential in meeting our goals in life. You can thus imagine their shock when I talked about “un.”
Luck, written in kanji as 運 or un, forms the first half of the infamous 運命 (unmei or fate). The latter kanji 命 (inochi) meant life or one’s life force or lifespan. In the Japanese language, one cannot spell destiny without spelling luck. But the matter is far from a linguistic happenstance.
As someone who grew up with video games, it is often enticing to look at the most high-definition game there is: the game called Life. Life, the game, is open-ended but challenging. You only have one heart, and you can decide on the quests you partake in every day.
We increase our intelligence as we go to school, read, learn online; our strength and agility as we go to the gym and exercise; our vitality as we take care of our health, drink vitamins, respond to illnesses. Intelligence, strength, and vitality, in gaming parlance, are called stats or status points. The distribution of our stats then becomes our “build.” Some builds are better suited for some goals, and some builds are necessary to level-up in a job. Could someone with a very low intelligence stat become a doctor? How will we have skyscrapers if not also for the manual labor that required strength? How do we prosper as a species if not for the collective improvement of our vitality?
But there is another stat that we often sweep under the rug, and that stat is called luck. Unlike the other stats, luck does not just come. Life itself was a product of luck: consider all the probabilities that had to happen for the first life form to come to fruition from the energy of the stars. Our emergence as a species, to a believer, is called God’s grace, and to others—simply, luck.
It was this string of probabilities that led you to this world, and let alone led you to read this blog. What were the chances that your parents met on the day they first met and after that led to your birth, when they could have had met other people? Unmei is no linguistic happenstance. It captures how destiny came from these probabilities.
As change-makers, this cognizance of luck brings important consequences. We must recognize that the have-nots did not choose to be born in poverty. Studies on economic outcomes in life show that our success has been preordained by birth.
In the 2004 World Bank Report on Ecuador’s poverty assessment, we can see that we are lucky if we have educated parents because the education level of the household head is an important correlate of poverty. In their analysis, non-poor families had 36.6% of household heads attended secondary education and 25.3% attended higher education. In contrast, 63.1% of household heads of poor families attended primary education or had no education. Even one’s birthday can determine one’s outcomes. In the 1991 and 1992 papers of Angrist and Krueger showed that those born in the latter part of the year (and thus entered school younger and had longer education) had higher earnings and eventually became better-off.
“On average” is the key term in these studies. We do see outliers. We revel in the rags to riches stories that inspire us to believe in perseverance. But these stories are precisely that–an inspiration. For if this was the norm, we would have soon bucked the trend of growing inequality. Instead, inequality has been widening for decades. And often, wealth is about location, location, location.
Last week, the Philippines was ravaged by Typhoon Ulysses just as the country was recovering from the aftermath of Typhoon Rolly. The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) estimated around PhP 1.19 billion worth of damage to agriculture and PhP 469.7 million to infrastructure due to Typhoon Ulysses. The damage caused by Typhoon Rolly to agriculture, on the other hand, was estimated at around PhP 2.9 billion. Ulysses damaged 25,852 homes, and Rolly damaged 98,249.
Since we cannot choose the households to be born into, we too cannot determine at birth the location of that household. We are born into communities. We are born into passports. Some are born into gated neighborhoods that are safe from petty crimes. And some are born into precarious areas that are susceptible to disasters. And while some can have a choice to move from such vulnerable areas, not everybody can afford such an option.
2019 Nobel Prize Winners Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee wrote a paper in 2006 called “The Economic Lives of the Poor” that laid down the “puzzles” and often counterintuitive lifestyle challenges of those in poverty. Our challenge as change-makers is to recognizes how differently they play the game of Life, not because they did not want to improve their conditions, but because the odds are often stacked against them. We have to create opportunities for equity, and not just equality. For equality is to divide the pie into equal pieces; and equity is to allot larger slices to those who need it more.
The reality is that Life is pay-2-win. A loading screen in the latest gacha craze Genshin Impact wrapped it nicely: “No matter where you are, the stars follow you.”
Elroy Rendor 