for years to one com- pany spread out over three floors-an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and administrative employees. (Feld- man wondered if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdevel- oped sense of entitlement. What he didnt consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)       If morality represents the way we would like the world to work and economics represents how it actually does work, then the story of Feldmans bagel business lies at the very intersection of morality and economics. Yes, a lot of people steal from him, but the vast majority, even though no one is watching over them, do not. This outcome may surprise some people-including Feldmans economist friends, who counseled him twenty years ago that his honor-system scheme would never work. But it would not have surprised Adam Smith. In fact, the theme of Smiths first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, was the innate honesty of mankind. "How selfish soever man may be supposed," Smith wrote, "there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it." There is a tale, "The Ring of Gyges," that Feldman sometimes tells his economist friends. It comes from Platos Republic. A student named Glaucon offered the story in response to a lesson by Socrates- who, like Adam Smith, argued that people are generally good even without enforcement. Glaucon, like Feldmans economist friends, dis- agreed. He told of a shepherd named Gyges who stumbled upon a se- cret cavern with a corpse inside that wore a ring. When Gyges put on the ring, he found that it made him invisible. With no one able to