Earlier quoted context omitted.
I learned one of the most valuable lessons of my life from RuneScape. My brother and I, playing for years, had amassed something like 100k gold between the two of us. We wanted more gold and were reading a guide online about to get it. The guide recommended a simple process of buying and selling coal in a kind of arbitrage trade. My brother and I were torn if we should try it, reasoning that if it were so easy to mak…
It's an old joke: An economist is walking down the street when he steps on a $100 bill lying on the ground. He spots it, but decides to keep walking and doesn't pick it up. “After all,” he thinks to himself, “if that had really been a $100 bill, someone else would have picked it up already!”
How does this translate to the efficient market hypothesis in general? Not sure, but if I were to dig down into how rational actors handle such situations, I'd expect to discover the math works out over continuous domain, and the joke is a paradox because we tend to think of money in discrete terms.