How do you know what really influenced your life outcomes? We all have stories about a great teacher or a terrible parent. But these are anecdotes. You don't a

How do you know what really influenced your life outcomes? We all have stories about a great teacher or a terrible parent. But these are anecdotes. You don't actually know what would have happened if you had different parents, or different friends, or went to a different school. It's perfectly possible that if circumstances were different, you would have gotten to the same place, by a superficially different path. The specific stories would vary, of course. But when we talk about society-level policy, it's not specific personal stories that we focus on. It's things like income, marital status, job field, health, criminality. A lot of evidence suggests that even if your specifics were very different you would have actually ended up largely in the same place on these metrics.