health and fitness: Exploiting gullible people is a modern form of mining

vendredi 7 août 2015

Exploiting gullible people is a modern form of mining

‘Deception and manipulation aren’t confined to the fringes of the economy – they’re central to how consumer capitalism works’

One serious contender for the title of History’s Most Gullible Person is a man from New York who is suing a psychic on the grounds that she’s a total fraud. Priscilla Delmaro stands accused of fleecing her anonymous customer of more than £450,000, which she’d promised to use to help him win the heart of a woman he loved. (Her expenses included £19,000 for a time machine, plus £50,000 for an 80-mile bridge made of gold – don’t ask.) Coincidentally, the object of the man’s affection died midway through this process. But Delmaro allegedly kept plugging away, promising that the dead woman would be reincarnated, at which point the man’s impressively elastic credulity snapped. “This caused me to start thinking,” he wrote in a statement provided to detectives, “that Delmaro wasn’t everything she was purporting to be.” Delmaro has denied the allegations.

If what he said is true, Delmaro’s customer, it’s reasonable to conclude, was a fool. And he certainly counts as a “phool”, as defined in Phishing For Phools, a forthcoming book by the economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. Technically, “phishing” is the scam whereby fraudsters persuade you to part with your financial details, using emails and websites that look trustworthy. But Shiller and Akerlof argue that deception and manipulation aren’t confined to the fringes of the economy; instead, they’re central to how consumer capitalism works. We’re being phished all the time (making us, in their terminology, phools). In a free market, one set of profit opportunities comes from exploiting people’s psychological weaknesses. Trickery is so commonplace, the authors show, that the line we draw between sleazy or illegal behaviour and canny business practice is pretty arbitrary. Almost as arbitrary, in fact, as the line between a fraudulent psychic and a non-fraudulent one.