https://proudstars.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-nobel-prize-winning-economist-who.html
The Nobel Prize winning economist who ate cat food
- 14 November 2015
- From the section Business
Once upon a time a Nobel Prize winning economist had a cat called Lightning.
Now, Lightning appeared to like his cat food, a rather pricey gourmet dish which claimed to be a cut above the rest.But maybe, thought the Nobel Prize winning economist, I have been fooled into thinking this cat food is a cut above the rest - when it isn't.
There is only one way to find out, said the economist.
And that is to eat it myself. And so he did. It was, he said with a giggle, pretty much like any other cat food.
And the moral of this tale, he says, is that he had been "phished for a phool" - or manipulated into buying something.
Now the economist in question, Robert Shiller and his fellow Nobel laureate George Akerlof, have written Phishing for Phools, about how the sellers of cat food and thousands of other products and services "phish" us into buying things we do not want or need.
"Of course they do it," he says. "If you had a cat food company you wouldn't say 'Dried Dead Fish' on the label...we live in a constructed world that's filled with deception like this."
Fools or not
"Phishing" was initially coined to describe internet fraud, but Profs Shiller and Akerlof use it more broadly to cover a world of deception, and add the term "phools" to describe its victims.Being gulled into paying more for cat food is hardly a serious affair. But the two economists see it as a microcosm of something much bigger in society.
