Luck: A Personal Account of Fortune, Chance and Risk in Thirteen Investigations

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Luck: A Personal Account of Fortune, Chance and Risk in Thirteen Investigations

Luck: A Personal Account of Fortune, Chance and Risk in Thirteen Investigations

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Or I would sit in Lenny’s chair in the office the partners shared, with its heavy furnishings, the pair of identical mahogany desks. Lenny, who was now invariably referred to as ‘that horse’s ass’ by my father, was seldom there. Highlights of my visits were if Pepe, the factory foreman, had any spare time for me. Pepe could sometimes be persuaded to play ping-pong in the recreation room, which was a light blue linoleum room off the main factory floor, where the machines were built. The factory floor itself was a hot, hellish place that I tried to avoid. It made me ashamedly aware of my narrow boyishness to enter this loud dirty world where bare-chested oily men laboured over machines.

In 1951, my father and mother, recently married, emigrated to the US, sponsored by his aunt Ruth, who was already in Brooklyn. In New York City, he believed, it didn’t matter how foreign you were: if you were smart and worked hard, you could get on in life. He continued to work in plastics factories. At some point, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, he got a job in a small manufacturing plant in Elizabeth, New Jersey, called Lened. The pianist Glenn Gould gave up performing live that year, preferring the technology of the recording studio. In 1966 he wrote: ‘Whether we recognize it or not, the long-player record has come to embody the very reality of music.’ However, football remained widespread and continued to be a rough and violent game until the mid-1800s when rules were standardised by English public schools. This paved the way for a comprehensive set of rules to be established across the UK. British games: cat’s cradle Two small girls playing cat’s cradle Date: 1888 RUSSIAN novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was a gambling addict. He believed that if he could only maintain his composure, the various strategies and systems he dreamed up to beat the roulette wheel would one day pay off. He was kidding himself. No strategy can defeat pure chance.Except he wasn’t. I’d circled around for a quarter of an hour or so before returning to the office. Squeak Piggy Squeak is a faintly ridiculous game that involves a blindfolded ‘farmer’ who sits in the centre of a circle of ‘piggies’ and must place a pillow on the lap of any of the surrounding piggies and then sit themselves on top of it. The piggy must squeak and if the farmer identifies him or her correctly, the piggy becomes the farmer.

I got over my guilt that I hadn’t made it to Elizabeth, that I’d allowed poor planning and the New York Marathon and telephone data usage and James Turrell to deflect me from it. Joe Flusfeder wouldn’t have minded. He was not a sentimental man. He never declared any feelings or curiosity or interest in Elizabeth, or Berkeley Heights, where he had, as they used to say, begun to ‘raise a family’. He had been in Elizabeth solely because of work, because Lenny Palermo and the unknown Ed had happened to set up a factory there. He chose, when he could afford to, to live in Manhattan. Elizabeth and Fort Lee and Berkeley Heights and Fresh Meadows, like London, like Monte Cassino or Siberia or Warsaw, were unavoidable steps on his way. When we first met, in our early twenties, we were both aspirant writers. Christopher was a poet, who was beginning to publish; I was a ‘novelist’, by intent rather than achievement. Christopher left poetry behind and has for many years been an adviser to and spokesperson for one of the richest men in the world. At the midtown office building where he works there is nothing to indicate what is transacted inside: no names on the door or in the huge white lobby with its fountain on the far wall, its travertine and glass and Mies van der Rohe chairs in the reception area, the cashmere-covered chairs in the executive suite.

‘Glorious’ David Spiegelhalter

I hadn’t prepared well. It was the day of the New York Marathon, and I kept being detoured around the route. After an hour of this I was still waiting at a junction to get onto the approach road to the George Washington Bridge. I had reached the data limit on my phone, which meant that Google Maps was unavailable and I was unlikely ever to find Henry Street in Elizabeth. So I parked the car and took the subway to meet my friend Christopher for lunch. This works well enough in day-to-day life, but, writes Flusfeder, the extension of this very human way of thinking to economics often fails when it turns out that past results are an imperfect guide to future performance. Henry VIII loved a spot of football – and is said to have owned the first pair of football boots. However, he banned it for being uncivilised – a decision that coincided with his declining health and athleticism.



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