Should happen, won't
The Quoth The Raven podcast talks often about MLM scams like Herbalife and Hubbard. He said something like "It's too bad we weren't evolved to detect frauds."

Like all human talents, perpetrating frauds and detecting frauds are two ends of a spectrum. Some people are good at the active end, some are good at the passive end. Most of us aren't inclined to create elaborate schemes and aren't good at spotting elaborate schemes.

That's where EDUCATION is supposed to enter the picture. Most of us can be TRAINED to detect a racket when it approaches us. The trouble is not lack of evolution, the trouble is TOTAL lack of education.

As I've noted before, radio and TV formerly did a fair job of showing how rackets work. The shows tended to emphasize one or two rather rare schemes like the Found Wallet or the Betting System, and probably didn't pay enough attention to MLM. This Racket Squad episode deals effectively with MLM, but I haven't seen any others.

Schools have NEVER touched the topic. The closest we got in high school was one hour of reading the old useless Guide To Propaganda Methods, which didn't help with real propaganda and didn't do anything for rackets.

I looked in DonorsChoose.org. Nope, no specific projects.

I tried a web search and found EXACTLY ONE lesson plan devoted to rackets. It looks good, but it's solely about identity theft, not MLM or stocks or bitcoin.

Government agencies offer plenty of useful info pages.

From Census Bureau.

From FTC.

And one good page from a commercial bank.

The info is there, but it's not distributed and taught to the people who need it.

Won't happen, of course. The people** in charge of school curricula are on the perpetration side, not the detection side.


= = = = =

** Wait! I was one of the people who wrote a school curriculum. Am I a fraudster? No, but the whole story shows that the original sentence was correct. When I was teaching at DeVry, one of my colleagues came up with the bright idea of setting up a training class under the Federal JTPA jobs program. He had worked with them before, and induced me to write a one-year electronics curriculum. The JTPA grant didn't come through. Later, after I burned out at DeVry, I applied for a different government training job and showed them the curriculum as part of my resume. They didn't hire me but they took the curriculum and used it. So the people in charge were in fact fraudsters.

Labels: Aberree, defensible spaces

  ¶ 3:55 PM