Do we? This conclusion seems to contradict with what is brilliantly explained above. It seems to say that upstream to all what is above we can — with our will — escape the poverty vicious circle (who wants to escape the rich virtuous circle?…). There is plenty of factual and theoretical evidence that this is not the case. In addition to the practical difficulties that are evoked in this post — education, in primis — there is the mighty power of behavioral biases that, unbeknownst to our conscience are restricting our choices upstream. But by far the most important necessary condition to be as ‘in control’ as this conclusion seems to say is time. Time is the greatest wealth in terms of potential of ‘choice’. And time exhibits a damning distributional inequality across income and social status. Because even if I am an investment banker, working 16 hours a day if I stop one day my world is not going to crumble into pieces as the one of those who can barely make ends meet. You can’t stop when you are poor, you just don’t have this luxury, you have to keep in running like mice in a spinning wheel. And the most terrible thing is that even if — by chance — you are presented with a choice that could change your status, you don’t really have time to think it over: the absence of time leads to poor choice. I am afraid that the idea that “we carry the power of choice” shares the same level of utopia than the Thomas Jefferson’s famous contribution to the US Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.