I have earned just as much money in my "life" as the $480 million that Lehman Brothers paid their former CEO Richard Fuld, but it took me a little longer to earn it.

When I was born in 8000 BC, before the invention of agriculture, I immediately began receiving a typical salary for an assistant professor at a small southern college, $48,000 per year.

I earned this princely salary without a break for 70 years, and as soon as I died at the extraordinarily old age (for a caveman) of 70, I was immediately reincarnated in the obstetrics ward of our cave, and began earning exactly the same salary as before.

At the time of my first "death," 70 years of non-stop professoring had earned me about $3.5 million, significantly more than the average assistant professor will earn in an ordinary career of about 40 years, but some of us are just luckier than others.

After 70 more years of academic toil, I expired again and was immediately reborn and re-hired, and likewise again and again through 143 generations, until my accumulated earnings added up to $480 million!

I hope this little story will inspire the youth of today to get out and fight for the few remaining tenure-track postitions at small southern colleges.

In only 10,000 years, you can earn just as much money as former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld, or any of the other bankers who destroyed the global economy.