On World Refugee Day, the Nobel Prize page chose to remember a child waiting for water. Omar Yaghi grew up outside Amman in a single room shared with nine siblings and the family’s cattle, with no electricity and no running water. His parents were Palestinian refugees from the village of al-Masmiyya, displaced in 1948; his father had finished sixth grade and his mother could neither read nor write. Water reached the neighbourhood for a few hours, as little as once a fortnight. If Omar did not rise before dawn to fill every container he could find, his family — and their cow — went without. He still recalls the whisper that ran down the street on those mornings: the water is coming.

Last October the boy who queued for a trickle shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto and Richard Robson of Melbourne, for the molecular frameworks that, among much else, can pull water out of thin air. This is more than a moving story. It is a pricing error — one the world commits, deliberately and at scale, every day.

Think of a refugee child as a financial economist would: a long-dated, deeply out-of-the-money option. The intuition behind Black–Scholes is that an option is worth more the more volatile the underlying and the longer until it expires. A displaced ten-year-old has both in the extreme — a........

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