August 24, 1967 — Abbie Hoffman, Wall Street, and the strange pull of free money
A handful of one-dollar bills falls onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. At first, people watch. Then someone bends down — and suddenly the dollar is no longer quite the same dollar.
Abbie Hoffman wanted to provoke Wall Street. What he exposed was something rather less convenient: the strange moment when value becomes desire, desire becomes competition, and the crowd quietly makes the ridiculous feel perfectly normal.
Money has a curious quality: it behaves very differently when there is a great deal of it in an account and when a single bill is lying on the floor in front of us.
In the first case, we can talk about it seriously. Investment strategy, returns, risk, liquidity, expectations. We sit upright, use the appropriate vocabulary and generally feel that we are the ones managing the money.
A bill on the floor offers a rather more direct relationship.
