Reading chapter 5, "Facts Can Save Your Life" made me think about some old sayings I am familiar with. Although the adages can be accurate this is not always the case.
When reading about Daniel Bullock, a doctor who was conned by a tax-shelter promotor it seems that someone of his stature , considering his education,would not have been deceived so easily by some con mon. He believed that this promotor would provide a legal way of evading taxes. That whole notion seems completely ridiculous,but sometimes we want to buy into an idea so badly that we choose not to use the rational part of our mind to truly think about it. It seems that when something is too good to be true, it usually is. This appears to be what happened with Bullock. It was too good to be true. Unfourtanetly he had plently of time to think about this in prison for tax evasion.
Another interesting point made in the chapter deals with another saying, you get what you pay for. This is something that I have been told and believed to be a true in a lot of cases. The Grey Goose effect deals with this notion that because something is more expensive then it is of better quality. When Grey Goose came out and was more expensive everyone believed it was the best. This happens a lot in marketing, where they will raise the prices on a product to make it seem of better quality and more desirable. Although I understand the reasoning behind it, it just still seems absurd that we are so shallow that raising the prices of something makes us want it more. It is something that I have been guilty of, since I also believed that the price could be a correlation to quality. Clearly in this chapter we learn that this is not always the case. Sometimes, it is just another mere tool used to mislead us.
No comments:
Post a Comment