Yesterday I found a dollar bill on the floor in the Journal newsroom. I picked it up and tacked it up on a little bulletin board in the middle of the newsroom. It’s still there today. People keep pointing at it and talking about it, but no one has taken it. It reminds me of my favorite economist joke.
An economist and his friend are walking down the street when the friend sees a ten dollar bill on the sidewalk.
“Look,” he says, “it’s a ten dollar bill”.
“Nonsense,” says the economist. “If that was a ten dollar bill, someone would have picked it up by now.”
Many Nobel prizes have been won by picking up the ten dollar bill.
Much of civilization has consisted of people picking up ten dollar bills that were left by others who, in a quick glance, thought that the bills were only worth a few pennies and thus not worth picking up.