Derek Thompson:

If you can't sell a product, try putting something nearly identical, but twice as expensive, next to it.

Even the most useless junk in the world is appealing if the price feels like a steal.

We're not stupid. Just susceptible.

A 1902 issue of The Sphinx, via Diana Kimball:

The times have bred a race of shop magicians who, having acquired the necessary digital skill to handle a few simple tricks, set themselves up in business and look to magical dealers to keep them supplied with an occasional new trick. Half of the regular outfits are simply professional models of tricks that in cheaper form are sold in the toy shops for the personal entertainment of the youth of our land, and there are hundreds of boys 12 years old who are as well posted on the methods of manipulation as are the magicians themselves.

Daniel Kahneman:

After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.

Investment bankers believe in what they do. They don't want to hear that their decisions are no better than chance. The rest of us pay for their delusions.

Jonathan Lethem:

A lot of us want to be fooled at the same time we get angry that we're fooled.

Martin Wolf:

Banks, as presently constituted and managed, cannot be trusted to perform any publicly important function, against the perceived interests of their staff. Today's banks represent the incarnation of profit-seeking behavior taken to its logical limits, in which the only question asked by senior staff is not what is their duty or their responsibility, but what can they get away with.

A final thought from the bankers:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.