Fortune, Risk, and the Microeconomics of Migration

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the fortune, the risk, and the microeconomics of migration. Fortune is the opportunity present in risk. Hence, howsoever men would comport themselves in the company of risk, their actions must in some part betray fortune's influence. By risk, it refers to the casual element of men's experience, the unreasoning and unforetold ways of the world, the irremovable dispersion in the imaginable assortments of events attending actions taken in ignorance. By fortune, it means the scope left for human judgment and volition where fate does not rule and outcomes are not all predetermined. Fortune represents the element of disorder essential to opportunity, the uncharted paths that afford men the freedom to learn and profit from the mutability of the world. It is fortune that furnishes occasions for the trials and training that are the substance of the human adventure. This usage reflects a thoroughly Renaissance view of the function of the casual element in the universal design, a merging of the traditions of Boethius, St. Thomas, and Dante. The chapter also discusses a model to describe the choice of an optimal single-period strategy of wealth accumulation for a von Neumann–Morgenstern utility-maximizing household, which may allocate as much as a fixed proportion s of its initial wealth to investments in migration and local job search.

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