Here’s a horrible little game you can play at your next family gathering. I call it the Billionaire’s Money Question, and it’s a real eye-opener. All you do is pose the following hypothetical question to your family:
“Suppose you found a thousand dollars in cash that you knew had been lost by a billionaire. Now, because this is a hypothetical question, let’s assume that the billionaire would never be aware that he lost it, and there would be no way that anyone else would know if you kept the money. And let’s say you knew there would be no reward or other indirect benefit in returning the money. Would you give it back?”
Also assume the billionaire is not Bill Gates just so the comments to this blog are not filled with Windows XP jokes.
If you ask this question in a group, I suspect a lot of people would say they’d give it back. But if you ask people privately, you might be surprised to discover how many of your family members are crooks. The best case scenario is that they’re just too lazy to give back the money. Either way, it’s not good news if you drop your wallet at the family reunion.
In my experience, most of the people who say they’d give back the cash are the ones who don’t need an extra thousand dollars. The ones who say they’d keep it usually have a good idea how they’d spend it.
A certain percentage of the population believes that God is watching them with one hand on a lightning bolt and the other on the trap door to Hell. About half of that group will also keep the money, under the theory that if God wanted the billionaire to have it, he never would have let him lose it in the first place.
How about you? Would you keep it?