A Wall Street state of mind has captured America

At what time and place should you meet a stranger in New York if you cannot communicate with them beforehand? This hypothetical puzzle was first posed by Thomas Schelling, a game theorist, in 1960, as a method of explaining “focal points”—the solution people default to when co-ordinating if they are unable to converse. The most common answer, according to students he quizzed, was noon at “the information booth in Grand Central Station”.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Forget about the tree”