International Law

Fraud News You Can Use: Identity Theft, Rational Thinking, and Free Stuff

Image via Wikipedia

Ed Dickson, writing at his blog Fraud, Phishing and Financial Misdeeds has a nice post about identity theft.  Here is the beginning, but you should read the whole article on identify theft.

"Identity theft is a serious subject, and according to recent reports, it's a growing problem. Because identity theft is out of control (personal opinion) and has victimized a lot of people, it's spawned a cottage industry that sells protection at a price. Critics, including the FTC, believe a lot of these identity theft companies are selling services that are supposed to be free.

If you've watched TV in the past year, you've probably seen the ads for FreeCreditReport.com. These ads have urban minstrels (guitar dudes) singing about the woes of people who have had their identities stolen or made poor credit choices. The idea is to get you to go to FreeCreditReport.com, which isn't exactly free."

Peter Boeteke, writing at the Economic Way of Thinking, lauds Tim Harford's writing on economic reasoning.  Read Harford and Dan Airely together, you will have a great balanced view reading both.

"Tim Harford is one of the best economic commentators around.  Contrary to the "freakonomics" crowd, his stretching of the economic way of thinking to ordinary life (or even unusual areas of life) is not a function of statistical puzzles.  Instead, it is all about seeing the world through the lens of economic analysis.  The justification of this exercise began with Wicksteed, was refined by Mises, and then further elaborated by Becker."

Sandeep Baliga, an international spy, writing at Cheap Talk, asks why people do things for free?  In his case, you don't get what paid for.

"People do all this stuff for free because of the prestige, the power and the fulfillment from affecting the direction of research of entire fields of research. In our case, Jeff and I are doing this because we're vain enough to think our random musing are interesting and useful.  I'd be at the New York Times website as usual right now if I weren't doing this so why not?"

Full post as published by Misleading Advertising Law on March 19, 2009 (boomark / email).