Spin the Coin

Waves of randomness batter individuals the hardest. Our best efforts can be swamped by chance, and the lotteries of birth – geography, genetics, community, time. Take a big step back, and you lose and gain information. Spin a coin once, and you have no idea whether it will be heads or tails with confidence. Spin it a million times, and if the coin is fair, it will be a hair’s breadth from half a million of each. One way to control for unwanted noise is to pool the risk. Let your fate be decided by the million spins, rather than the one. Be part of a group. To accept that, you must accept the cross subsidies. A Cross Subsidy is where one group of consumers pay a higher price, so that another group pay an artificially lower price. It is like splitting the bill. The question is when you will care enough about the container to be okay with splitting. If you intentionally had salad and water, you are going to be bitter about paying for steak and champagne. Understandable. That is different from voluntarily acknowledging the coin of life has treated you well, and chipping into the container of 7.8 billion individual spins. Even though you already know the result, and can pretend it is merit.