Posted by Adrian Toll on April 8th, 2009 - Add a comment
Reading about the unfolding credit crunch, a name which now seems rather quaint given the burgeoning catastrophe throughout world markets and personal finances, has been rather like rubbernecking a car crash around the corner, only to realise too late that the car in front has slammed it’s brakes on and you’re about to plough into it. As the consequences of the crisis in financial markets trickle down into everybody’s lives (”trickle down economics” never before contained such bitter irony), it seems an appropriate time to survey some of the more readable and enlightening articles about the crisis, while taking a look at what happened, what’s happening now, and what might happen in the future.
In the first of three articles we take a look at what happened and how, despite the financial arrangements being characterised as almost immeasurably complicated, it is in fact pretty easy to understand what happened.
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Posted by Adrian Toll on April 22nd, 2008 - Add a comment
At a party in Bristol a few years ago, I met a barrister who had recently started to train as a magician. He was an intense person, standing a bit closer than people normally do, and fixing me with a stare. When I realised that he was dangling in front of me the watch that he’d removed from my wrist, I have to admit I was impressed. It’s a pretty standard trick, but I count myself as being an alert person, almost to the point of edginess, and it’s unusual for something like that to escape my attention.
What he was using is called “misdirection” – a simple trick where the magician makes you more interested in something else (in this case his close proximity and the close attention he directed at me) while removing your watch. (Having said that, and to his credit, you still have to be extremely dexterous to do something like that).
Another more threatening example was when my mobile phone got stolen. I was sitting outside a cafe when some kids came up to me and one thrust a piece of paper with something scrawled on it into my face, mumbling something unintelligible – all my attention was on the fact that the first kid was too close for comfort, and I didn’t notice that the second one had simply picked my mobile up from the table until they were long gone. Misdirection can seem like magic, but in a different context you can feel like you’ve been conned.
Advertising and marketing have adopted this trick of misdirection, except it’s more subtly done, and it aims to avoid the feeling that you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes – on the contrary, it aims to please. This move towards misdirection has been recent, as advertising has become steadily more sophisticated. Have a look at this Persil advert from the 1960s:
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