I don't think the situations are at all similar. If you come across a $100 bill, chances are you are in fact the first person to come across it. You've already beaten the odds.
If you come across a man in his 30s-40s who has always been single, chances are he is not a '$100 bill' man. It's possible that he is, but it's very unlikely. This is not the same as saying that there are no such thing as older '$100 bill' men, just like $100 bills do sometimes (but very rarely) end up on sidewalks.
I think you’re missing the entire point of the joke.
>If you come across a $100 bill, chances are you are in fact the first person to come across it.
The economist assumes you won’t be the first person because of market efficiency. Your assumption above disregards this. It seems like you are having a hard time reconciling that with the imagined scenario of seeing the bill, because the assumption is someone who noticed it previously would have picked it up. The fact that those two don’t reconcile is the whole point.
The equivalent would be if someone were saying "Oh I met this handsome, rich, kind, unmarried 45-year-old man last night, but there must be something wrong with him, or else someone would have married him already." But I'm not saying that and I don't think the originator of this sub-thread is either. We're saying "Only a small portion of the available older men will actually be attractive mates (on whatever dimensions) because those who are attractive will have mostly been taken already."
It's like an economist saying "It's not a good use of your time to go outside scouring the sidewalks for $100 bills." That's not funny, it's just accurate.
>The equivalent would be if someone were saying "Oh I met this handsome, rich, kind, unmarried 45-year-old man last night, but there must be something wrong with him, or else someone would have married him already."
We may be reading it differently but to my eyes, GP said essentially the same thing with
"by definition they won't meet the highest of standards. Because if they did, they wouldn't be single."
In other words, that rich, kind, high standard unmarried 45 year old must have something wrong with him or he wouldn't be single. I didn't take them to mean "there's a smaller pool to select from" because that's trivially apparent as more people get married, but it also cuts down on the competition as well.
I don't think anyone would argue that the longer a buffet table is open, the less chance there is to get the best choices. But the economist was saying "That cake still on the buffet line can't be good because if it were, it wouldn't be there." That's much more aligned with the GP's statement.
If you come across a man in his 30s-40s who has always been single, chances are he is not a '$100 bill' man. It's possible that he is, but it's very unlikely. This is not the same as saying that there are no such thing as older '$100 bill' men, just like $100 bills do sometimes (but very rarely) end up on sidewalks.