The Economics of Making It Happen

On the Subtle Art of Taming the Dice

We often imagine life as a roll of the dice. Some are born wealthy, others poor; some meet opportunity, others misfortune. Luck, chance, randomness — these seem to govern much of what unfolds. Yet the story of human progress is the story of refusing this passivity. Again and again, individuals and societies have sought to transform uncertainty into predictability, randomness into structure, luck into law.

This is more than ambition; it is survival. Farmers learned to read the seasons, reducing dependence on the whims of weather. Merchants invented contracts, limiting the chaos of trade. Scientists built models that transform natural mysteries into predictable patterns. Each act of progress has been an act of domestication: bending chance toward determinism.

At the personal level, this becomes the “make it happen” attitude. To accept randomness is to drift; to resist it is to create. Agency, in this sense, is the deliberate transformation of contingency into design. Life becomes less about what occurs and more about what one insists upon.

This essay reflects on this universal struggle — the desire to tame the random. For those who value the fusion of philosophy and economics in such reflections, I invite you to support this work with a paid subscription. It is your contributions that allow me to write these long-form explorations that probe beneath the surface of daily life.