MANIPULATION AND DECEPTION

George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller, Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (“We are creating a new, broader meaning for the word phish here. . . . It is about getting people to do things that are in the interest of the phisherman, but not in the interest of the target.”  Id. at xi. “By our definition, a phool is someone who, for whatever reason, is successfully phished”. Id. at xi.  “Free markets do not just produce what we really want; they also produce what we want according to our monkey-on-the-shoulder tastes. Free markets are also about producing wants, so we will buy what they have to sell. In the United States the goal of almost every business person (with the exception of some who sell stocks and bonds and bank accounts . . . ) is to get you to spend your money. Free markets produce continual temptation. Life is a proverbial trip to a parking lot in which you are constantly passing spaces left open for the disabled.” Id. at 20.  Note: The late twentieth and  early twenty-first centuries has seen an explosion in schools, and education generally, operating on a corporate-business model, and this is not just in for-profits schools. So, if key university administrators are essentially businessmen and businesswomen who are trying to get you to spend your money, then what are they really selling? Is it some thing one needs? Or is, it a something you want, and want because the ‘want’ has been manufactured? In otherwords, to what extent do universities phish for phools?).