Three Articles

Here's an exerpt from "Arbitrage and why we love being conned" by Megan McArdle in Newsweek.  To read the entire article, click here.

"… fraudsters and Ponzi schemers do not succeed at their scams merely because we let them. Recent financial frauds have big dollar signs attached, but at their heart, they’re often not much different from Nigerian email scams or a three-card monte game. They work best when they let the mark believe he’s getting away with something—often something illegal, or at least dishonest. It’s an old saw that “you can’t cheat an honest man,” but it’s mostly true. We are most vulnerable to Ponzi schemes and other confidence tricks when we start to believe that we can cheat the universe—that we can get something for nothing. The best con men succeed mostly because we are so desperate to believe them. ..."

Next is a post from Wonkblog titled "How often do Presidents get what they want?" by Dylan Matthews.  Read it here.

Finally is an excerpt from an article called "All the spammers in the world may only make $200 million a year" by Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic.  Click here for the entire article.

"… It is just so cheap to send spam and even if you only ensnare a tiny number of people, that's enough to make it worthwhile. Rao and Reiley estimate that only 1 in 25,000 people need somehow buy something through spam advertising to make it worthwhile. …"