How much are you worth?

Human beings are complicated creatures, but we are also relentless forecasters. We spend much of our lives trying to infer the future from the past. Investors scrutinize market data to anticipate tomorrow’s returns. Meteorologists analyze yesterday’s weather to predict next week’s storms. And most of us, at some point, wonder where our own lives are headed. There is a reason for this impulse. A future that is completely predetermined would make life dull. But a future that is entirely random would make life impossible. After all, randomness means that past events provide no information whatsoever about what will happen next. If that were truly the case, planning would be pointless. Every decision would be a coin toss. Fortunately, most aspects of life sit somewhere between these extremes. They are neither perfectly predictable nor completely chaotic. Patterns exist. Trends repeat. Signals can be detected, albeit imperfectly. One of the domains where people most want predictive clarity