首页
登录
职称英语
On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the "inside man" in a classic
On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the "inside man" in a classic
游客
2023-12-05
19
管理
问题
On a Los Angeles street corner in 2000, I was the "inside man" in a classic con game called the pigeon drop. A magician named Dan Harlan orchestrated it for a television series I cohosted called Exploring the Unknown(type "Shermer, con games" into Google). Our pigeon was a man from whom I asked directions to the local hospital while Dan(the "outside man")moved in and appeared to find a wallet full of cash on the ground. After it was established that the wallet belonged to neither of us and appeared to have about $3,000 in it, Dan announced that we should split the money three ways.
I objected on moral grounds, insisting that we ask around first, which Dan agreed to do only after I put the cash in an envelope and secretly switched it for an envelope with magazine pages stuffed in it. Before he left on his moral crusade, however, Dan insisted that we each give him some collateral("How do I know you two won’t just take off with the money while I’m gone?"). I enthusiastically offered $50 and suggested that the pigeon do the same. He hesitated, so 1 handed him the sealed envelope full of what he believed was the cash(but was actually magazine pages), which he then tucked safely into his pocket as he willingly handed over to Dan his entire wallet, credit cards and ID. A few minutes after Dan left, 1 acted agitated and took off in search of him, leaving the pigeon standing on the street corner with a phony envelope and no wallet!
After admitting my anxiety about performing the con(I didn’t believe I could pull it off)and confessing a little thrill at having scored the goods, I asked Dan to explain why such scams work. "We are that way as the human animal," he reflected. "We have a conscience, but we also want to go for the kill. " Indeed, even after we told our pigeon that he had been set up, he still believed he had the three grand in his pocket!
Greed and the belief that the payoff is real also led high-rolling investors to fuel Wall Street financier Bernard Madoff’s record-breaking $50-billion Ponzi scheme in which he kept the money and paid an 8 to 14 percent annual annuity with cash from new investors. As long as more money comes in than goes out, such scams can continue, which this one did until the 2008 market meltdown, when more investors wanted out than wanted in. But there were other factors at work as well, as explained by the University of Colorado at Boulder psychiatry professor Stephen Greenspan in his new book The Annals of Gullibility(Praeger, 2008), which, with supreme irony, he wrote before he lost more than half his retirement investments in Madoff’s company! "The basic mechanism explaining the success of Ponzi schemes is the tendency of humans to model their actions, especially when dealing with matters they don’t fully understand, on the behavior of other humans," Greenspan notes.
The effect is particularly powerful within an ethnic or religious community, as in 1920, when the eponymous Charles Ponzi promised a 40 percent return on his fellow immigrant Italian investors’ money through the buying and selling of postal reply coupons(the profit was supposedly in the exchange rate differences between countries). Similarly, Madoff targeted fellow wealthy Jewish investors and philanthropists, and that insider’s trust was reinforced by the reliable payout of moderate dividends(so as not to attract attention)to his selective client list, to the point that Greenspan said he would have felt foolish had he not grabbed the investment opportunity.
The evolutionary arms race between deception and deception detection has left us with a legacy of looking for signals to trust or distrust others. The system works reasonably well in simple social situations with many opportunities for interaction, such as those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. But in the modern world of distance, anonymity and especially complicated investment tools(such as hedge funds)that not one in a thousand really understands, detecting deceptive signals is no easy feat. So as Dan reminded me, "If it sounds too good to be true, it is." [br] According to the author, where there is______, there is such scam.
选项
A、greediness
B、surplus
C、investment
D、conscience
答案
B
解析
推断题。由第四段第二句可知,只要进入市场的钱比流出的多,这种骗局就可以进行下去,因此[B]正确。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3246863.html
相关试题推荐
Explosivedevicesarehiddeninside______inthesetwopackages.[br][origina
Explosivedevicesarehiddeninside______inthesetwopackages.[originaltext]
LosAngelescabinet-makerEdwardStewartmaybeamodernDr.Frankenstein.In
LosAngelescabinet-makerEdwardStewartmaybeamodernDr.Frankenstein.In
DrivingalongSouthStreet,wheretheLosAngelessprawlmeetssprawlingOra
DrivingalongSouthStreet,wheretheLosAngelessprawlmeetssprawlingOra
DrivingalongSouthStreet,wheretheLosAngelessprawlmeetssprawlingOra
LiteratureofNeoclassicismisdifferentfromthatofRomanticisminthatA、thef
DumbandDumber,oneofthemodernclassicsofAmericancomedy,tellsthest
DumbandDumber,oneofthemodernclassicsofAmericancomedy,tellsthest
随机试题
Amongstwomen,itisnotindividualstatusthatmatterssomuchlikebeing
______(你不得把你电子邮件帐号的密码告诉别人)isrequiredintheregulations.Thatyoushouldnot
社会因素影响健康的途径有A.身体、心理、社会适应 B.神经、体液、免疫 C.
服务质量是一种衡量企业服务水平满足()的工具,它取决于顾客对服务质量的预期同他真
下列哪些不属于土颗粒中结合水的特点?()A溶解能力降低 B密度变大 C
Thechangeinthatvillagewasmiraculou
左边给定的是纸盒的外表面,下面哪一项能由它折叠而成?
A.向下移动一些 B.保持不变 C.向上移动一些 D.与水的深度有关,无法
国家开发银行成立于()年。A.1984 B.1990
关于抵押的说法,正确的有( )。 A.抵押物只能是不动产 B.抵押人不再负
最新回复
(
0
)