story · one chapter at a time · one note per chapter, under the lens

I didn't climb the distribution. I grew up crossing it.

Not an autobiography — context. Two family sides, two economic worlds, several countries, one childhood; then a border at eighteen. The crossings are the credential; the ideas are the point.

the range, not the rank, is the thing I learned to read.

the crossings — six chapters, one range

Lima — two worlds at once

A dense middle neighbourhood, a mother working many jobs, and two family sides that sat at different heights of the same city: one that ran businesses, one that worked for wages. Weekends moved between them. I never felt poor. I felt the difference — and a child can read a gap long before he can name it.

two seats on one curve, every week. the gap was the first thing I measured.

two seats, one curve. the same city held both; the child went back and forth.

— and every summer until fifteen, the family farm: bucket showers, dinner was what we raised. Not a chapter. A parallel current through all of them.

The crossings

Ica. India, briefly. Back to Lima. Different societies, and somehow always a similar seat in each — surrounded by every level at once. I didn't read about inequality first; I had stood at several points of it, and what stayed was the wish to understand the why of everything.

exposure was the constant. the country changed; the range around me didn't.

a similar seat in each. the width of the society changed; my place in it barely moved.

III

Toronto, at eighteen — the setback

Landed on New Year. Months to find work, little English, then a kitchen for a year and a half while I studied the language. Many immigrants make this trade: position now for possibility later. A setback, not a fall — and frugality was the first instrument I owned.

a border reprices human capital overnight — I paid about two years to it. some people pay a whole profession. same tax, different rates.

a step, then a plateau. the border took two years; the slope came back.

The doors nobody talks about

A bridge program closed the gap between high school and university — eight courses, most of them English. A door to discounted tuition opened. A second home full of books; I don't have one single hero — it accumulates little by little. Then university, never on a full load, working part-time the whole way through. Support that bought me the rarest input of all.

time to think is a unique luxury that we don't think much about. without those doors I am probably still in that kitchen, with no time to read.

a corridor of doors. three opened. the counterfactual is the kitchen.

The turn

Before any of it, I had been training to be a pilot. Business courses didn't convince me. The Wealth of Nations was the first book that connected economics, society, and history to what I had already seen. A counselor said one word: economics. It fit. Economics with philosophy beside it, in a language I fought with for years — that part I'm proud of.

ε in my own regression — one book, one word, a redirected life.

the residual. the fitted line is the expected path; the amber point is the one that mattered.

Now — the dependence reversed

Finished around the pandemic; months of searching; then years in one place, sharpening the hard instruments. An economist beside data science, not inside it; the next instrument is advanced econometrics — next, not started. And the flow reversed: I used to depend on others — now others can depend on me.

the range I crossed as a child is what the instruments were bought to explain.

the arrows turned around. the same node; the direction is the difference.

the same story, plotted plainly: not a ladder I climbed — a range I kept crossing.
each point is a world I lived in; under the lens, the arrows are the childhood between them.

I did not learn the distribution from a textbook. I lived at several points of it.

The instruments came later — to understand why. what the crossings taught me →