So in October 1970, Black and Scholes submitted a paper to the Journal of Political Economy. Rejection: Too specialized, the journal said. They tried another journal. Rejection: Too many papers competing for too little space in its pages. Black, himself, suspected the ivory-tower class system at work. He later grumbled, “One reason these journals didn’t take the paper seriously was my non-academic return address.” In the end, the paper was rewritten and published in the Journal of Political Economy—but only after two friends from the University of Chicago, Fama and Merton Miller, lobbied the
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