Blindsided

Jonathan Gifford

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• Employabilité, métiers et formations

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) PTE LTD
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814382656
• Langue: English

Extrait

blindsided

Copyright Jonathan Gifford 2012
Published by Marshall Cavendish Business
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The right of Jonathan Gifford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved
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The authors and publisher have used their best efforts in preparing this book and disclaim liability arising directly and indirectly from the use and application of this book. All reasonable efforts have been made to obtain necessary copyright permissions. Any omissions or errors are unintentional and will, if brought to the attention of the publisher, be corrected in future printings.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-981-4382-65-6
Cover design by OpalWorks
Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
To my wife Mary, who makes everything possible
Contents
INTRODUCTION
We Should Have Seen This Coming Rushes and Booms Brave New Worlds Riots and Credit Crunches Dust Bowls and Plagues In Search of Self-Knowledge
1 SOONERS, BOOMERS AND BOO
The Race to be First On the Edge of a New Frontier Boom, Bubble and Bust Boo.com Grow Now, Make Profits Later A Runaway Locomotive, Fuelled by Banknotes Hire Now, Ask Questions Later Miss Boo s Bad Hair Day Soft Launch, Hard Landing
2 BUBBLES AND CRASHES
To Market, To Market The Rational Market A Never-Ending Cycle A Licence to Print Money House of Cards A Very Big Baburu If the Price is Right Oscillations Around a State of Equilibrium Drift, Momentum and Irrationality Irrational Exuberance Short Memories
3 THE SCIENCE OF DESIRE
The Id, the Ego the Ad Selling a Cure A Broken Trust Consumption Engineering Techniques of Mass Persuasion The Id Goes Shopping Insights and Insults Playing to Our Emotions Selling Politicians to the People Eisenhower Answers America The Consumer Society
4 NEW LAMPS FOR OLD
New Driver Banking On Gas The Death Knell of Every Traditional Integrated Firm Virtual Integration One Side of Every Trade Better Than the Market? An Environment Ripe for Abuse A Cool New Kind of Company The Unthinkable Happens Handsomely Rewarded for Losing Billions Accounting Held to Account The Slippery Slope Why Were We So Blindsided by Enron?
5 THE GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL
People Power When Tyrants Fall Walls Come Tumbling Down Rights, Rents and Total Democracy Law and Fair Play The Gunfight at the OK Corral The Earp Vendetta Ride Law and Peace Us and Them
6 WEAPONS OF MASS FINANCIAL DESTRUCTION
Anything Except Onions Transition and Trauma Why Did No One See It Coming? Infinity and Beyond Subprimes, Teasers and Balloons Mortgage Madness Originate and Sell The Financial Instruments Formerly Known as Bonds Rating Risk Repackaged Bonds Weird Beasts from the Wall Street Jungle A Collection of Betting Slips Synthetic Bets, Synthetic Assets At the Heart of the Credit Crunch Survival of the Greediest
7 DUST BOWL AND THE DIRTY THIRTIES
The Sale of the Century The Louisiana Purchase The Wrong Sort of Country Wild and Untamed Rain Follows Plough Wrong Side Up Black Sunday Sustainability The Tragedy of the Commons We Know This Won t Last Forever
8 THE BLACK DEATH
Going Viral The Great Plague A Twentieth-Century Plague Not If, But When
9 THE BLINDSIDED BRAIN
Fast and Slow Thinking Blind to the Obvious Unconscious Influences The Emotional Brain Iowa Gambling Task Fear and Reward The Left Right Hemispheres Big Picture, Little Picture Two Different Ways of Experiencing the World Split-Brain Experiments Cognitive Neuroscience Right Hemispheres Do Empathy, Left Hemispheres Do Denial Who Are We? Taking Charge
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Blindsided. It s strange. We seem to have woken up on a surprisingly large number of mornings in the few millennia of our existence as a species and thought: Did we really do that? How could that happen? How could we have been so stupid? Why were we so completely blindsided by that particular set of events? Why, for goodness sake, didn t we see it coming?
It s a very good question, and it has a very simple answer - and one that we should not be particularly ashamed of. It is, I am confident, because we are human.
We Should Have Seen This Coming
Being blindsided, in the context of this book, is something that happens to us. A particular set of events unfolds and the end result is not what we would have wished for. But there is another component to this interpretation of being blindsided. It is not just that the outcome is not what we wanted, it is that we feel, in some way, that we should have predicted it; that it fits a pattern we should have recognised; that, although the set of events was highly unlikely, we should have known from our own experience or from the records of our ancestors that these things can happen, and that we have been foolish not to have prepared for it, like squirrels who have failed to gather nuts for the coming winter.
Intriguingly, it is impossible to imagine animals being blindsided in this way. The animal who behaves like our hypothetical foolish squirrel does not survive, and neither do his or her genes. We do not seem to find our cousins, the great apes - chimpanzees, gorillas, orang utans - tidying up after some disaster in the forest and muttering, ruefully, We really should have seen that one coming. What were we thinking of? To be blindsided, it seems to be necessary to be human. It also seems to be necessary to belong to the same group.
We are, after all, highly social animals. Some scientists believe that the complexity and size of the brain of any species is a function of the complexity of the social networks within which that species has evolved. To be able to reconcile the interests of the individual and the group successfully, it is argued, is uniquely demanding in terms of brain power. The social brain hypothesis suggests that being able to survive and reproduce more efficiently in a group requires demanding mental mechanisms for social cohesion that create an evolutionary pressure towards increased brain size. Being sociable, it seems, is difficult - which is believable.
Being sociable also creates problems for modern social animals like mankind. We tend to exhibit herd-like behaviour. After all, if we stand out too much from the herd, then the herd begins to worry that we might be genuinely different - that we might actually be a predator. Such individuals tend not to survive in herds. Our very sociability, once established, tends to drive us to behave in the same way as the rest of the group.
In this, however, we are very much like our primate cousins, and indeed like most mammals and birds: we are capable of individual, intelligent initiative, but, when everybody else flocks or stampedes, we find it very hard not to join in. What sets humans apart - what creates the possibility of being blindsided in ways that other species are not - is our unique ability to create belief systems that persuade us that what we are doing is sensible and far-sighted, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. Other species are not surprised when they have eaten all of the berries on the bushes. They move on, and eat something else. We, in sharp contrast, seem to find ourselves bewildered and astonished when the berries run out. There s plenty here for everyone, we seem to have persuaded ourselves. These good times will last forever! There is a sense that one needs a community of believers to create the possibility of being blindsided - a collection of people in relatively close connection with one another who begin to sustain a myth about what is really happening.
This, however, is to prejudge the issue. This book will demonstrate - and in the last chapter analyse in detail - the proposition that we human beings are far less rational than we like to believe. Research in the field of psychology suggests that we make a large number of our decisions very quickly, based on previous experience. There is a very good evolutionary reason for this: most decisions that are relevant to our survival, to our ability to evaluate threat and opportunity, are best taken quickly. Our brains, as a result, are now hard-wired for this. But while this quick decision-making process works well in the majority of cases, it is prone to biases and systematic errors, which lead us, without our knowledge, into making some spectacularly bad choices.
Emotions have been found to play a far bigger role in our decision-making than we like to believe, given our vision of ourselves as rational beings who make decisions as the result of having weighed up various alternatives in the light of pure reason . This model of our own decision-making process seems, sadly, to be another delusion of ours. Discoveries in the field of neuroscience