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Sesame Street explains the Madoff Scandal
Thanks to Between the Lines for the pointer to this lovely little video about economics. Okay, it's probably not really from Sesame Street, and it's not in any way accurate.1 But regardless of correctness, it is rather viscerally satisfying...
1 I find most of the "Madoff is Evil Incarnate" hype to miss the point: the scary thing is that I suspect he simply fell into an easy trap of his own making, and that most people, after the first few steps, would have made just the same decisions he did. The thing about pyramid schemes is that they are easy to start, and *very* hard to stop. You get deeper and deeper so fast that all you can do is keep feeding the monster until it eats you. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if it started the same way as the Satyam mess: cooking the books just a little to smooth out a glitch, and then covering over each successive layer until all you have left is the fraud...
1 I find most of the "Madoff is Evil Incarnate" hype to miss the point: the scary thing is that I suspect he simply fell into an easy trap of his own making, and that most people, after the first few steps, would have made just the same decisions he did. The thing about pyramid schemes is that they are easy to start, and *very* hard to stop. You get deeper and deeper so fast that all you can do is keep feeding the monster until it eats you. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if it started the same way as the Satyam mess: cooking the books just a little to smooth out a glitch, and then covering over each successive layer until all you have left is the fraud...