To summarize: life usually doesn't offer a succession of quantified wagers like one would ideally like. Nothing to do with friction, you just don't know the exp

To summarize: life usually doesn't offer a succession of quantified wagers like one would ideally like. Nothing to do with friction, you just don't know the expected value of anything other than lotteries or other chance games where a trustworthy entity backs them up. You simply can't assume that you will always be able to pick "real life" wagers with positive expected values. The closest you can get are "traditional investments" for which you can look at past returns and hope for the future to repeat the past. For new situations, there simply isn't enough data. If you decide to start a startup today, what's your expected value? Do you have access to data about all startups ever started, costs involved and payouts? How does that change if you segment it by startup type, decade, etc? Can you say for sure that starting it has a positive expected value in terms of utility to you as opposed to the probabilistic certainty of the expected value of the 9k wager?