Alfred Kahn

Some of us have spent a few years in Ithaca, New York, a town at the foot of one of the picturesque Finger Lakes. Ithaca is gorges! (gorgeous... oh, forget it.)

As delightful as it might be, it takes a while to get to Ithaca from anywhere. You end up driving through hours of corn fields topped with dilapidated silos. It's like you're in the Midwest, except you're in upstate New York.

Ithaca used to have a bustling passenger train line, but it stopped functioning decades ago. The reason behind it? There wasn't one exactly: a series of various choices led to its closure. Alfred E. Kahn, a professor of economics at Ithaca's Cornell University, called it a "tyranny of small decisions". Each decision might not have mattered on its own (and might have even been rational), but, at the end — closed railroad. (And good luck getting to Ithaca in the winter through its heaps of snow!)

Kahn's concept can be applied to many other aspects, such as environmental deterioration or fluctuations of economic markets. Even on a personal level, a series of small logical decisions can lead to, on this weekday morning, reminiscing about Ithaca instead of earning a steady paycheck.

But it also leads to this delightful profile, so it's not all bad.