Business
Luck shapes every life, since a few drops more or less in our brain chemistry matter enormously. But the same stroke of bad luck carries graver consequences the lower your income, because there is less cushion to absorb it.
Any reading, whether how-to manual, scripture, fiction or nonfiction, is a search for help from someone who isn't yourself. Even pushing through a dull novel about a distant country is an attempt to understand forces that globalisation now brings into your own life.
The 'self' in self-help is slippery, and more often than not the self being helped is the author's rather than the reader's. A book sold as a guide to one goal may really be teaching something else.
Television gives the poor a constant clear window onto how the rich live. That familiarity feeds rising frustration, anger and violence rather than contentment.
Moving to the city weakens the extended-family bonds that both supported and stifled people. What replaces them is a mix of insecurity and anxiety alongside new productivity and potential.
Climbing from poverty to fortune in a fast-growing economy is not clean work. It runs through bribes, rivals, debt, violence and cruelty, which are part of the method rather than exceptions to it.
When a growing city drains and poisons its groundwater, clean water turns into a scarce commodity someone can sell. A basic need that public systems fail to meet becomes the raw material for a private empire.
A counterfeit product survives only if buyers can't tell it from the real thing. So the person selling fakes has to care about quality even more than an honest seller does.