Scams (Lapham's Quarterly 8-02, Swindle & Fraud)

Lapham’s Quarterly 8-02: Swindle & Fraud (2015). An entertaining read, and for that reason

possibly a misleading one. It’s fun to read about how swindles and frauds work, about how greedy people fall for a con, how clever the swindlers have been. It may fool one into believing that these insights will make us immune. Which is of course not so.

Every successful swindle relies on our propensity to deceive ourselves. We want something for nothing, or as close as we can get to it. We want to be insiders, a member of that exclusive group that knows better than everybody else. We believe we are smarter than the average bear and can spot opportunities for profit that escape everyone else. We are sure that we can tell the truth from falsehood, that we know enough about the real world that we can tell when someone is blowing smoke in our ears. And we are wrong on all these counts.

I hope that reading this wonderful collection will continue to remind me that I’m as likely to fall for a scam as everyone else. It just takes someone to figure out what buttons to push.

Recommended. ****