Chryselephantine

Fascimile of Browning’s “old yellow book.”

He will spend the first twenty-one of those years being too young—too young to live independently, too young to drink alcohol, too young to make decisions for himself. At twenty-one he becomes a full adult, with all the privileges thereunto appertaining. At twenty-nine he realizes that he is almost thirty, and begins morbid reflections on his own mortality; and when he turns thirty his friends give him a party with black candles on the cake and a big “Over the Hill” banner on the wall, and after that he is too old. So of his eighty years on this earth, he will spend exactly eight, or ten per cent, being the right age. The other ninety per cent of his life is spent being the wrong age.

The Econ Division employed analysts, the midlevel, and research assistants, the next level down. The idea here was division of labor: RAs did the repetitious, boring tasks, analysts the more demanding. But something in my innards resisted this division. I was always getting down, into details, doing my own literature searches, crunching my own numbers, plotting my own graphs. Something odd always happened in this process, and I became aware of that. I absorbed more information; my sense of mastery over the material grew; my confidence increased. I never trembled meeting with clients—as other analysts frequently did. I knew where all the bones were buried and the reason why.

Not to mention most of the capital cities are naturally defended by terrain, which is very useful for a supervillain. (Take Melbourne: the only way in by sea, Port Phillip Bay, requires a map or you hit rocks in the shallows; by air you have to travel a few thousand kilometers from anywhere; and by land you have to put up with lots of forests and distant homes.)