How much of me is mine?
I did not choose my passport, my parents, my languages, my travels or my schools. I have not chosen to be born on in an prosperous nation. Somewhere in the world there must be an version of me with the same ambition and none of the doors, where the only difference between us is an accident neither of us was present for.

John Rawls refers to "morally arbitrary"; the idea that the distribution of both talent and starting position is simply down to an matter of luck, and that luck confers no entitlement. I return to this line quite a bit because it refuses to exit my mind: while it does not allow me to say I earned this; it also does not let me sit in guilt.

Rather, what it leaves me with is an question about use; and responsibility. So, I study economics because it gives shape to questions: why some advantages compound across generations, why poverty can endure, and how institutions can widen or narrow the space of what is possible.

Development finance feels like the place where those questions become concrete. I am drawn to its complexity between countries, histories, resources, and institutions & politics, but moreover to its human scale: the possibility that capital, patiently and intelligently used, might make a life less constrained by an accident of birth. I do not think that the opportunity I have received creates a debt that can be settled. But it does create an obligation; I owe it my attention, my care, my love and my diligence. I owe those that never be, were and are what I am and will obtain, an opportunity of an future.