Maybe Our Elites Aren't So Elite?

Perhaps

You may have heard the strange tale of one Charlotte Cowles, a “financial-advice columnist” for New York magazine who recently published a 5,5000-word story about handing a shoebox filled with $50,000 in cash to a scammer. It’s an incredible tale, in the sense that the ridiculous lies the scammers told would be credible only to a professional journalist.

It’s not the sort of thing I would want anyone to know I had done, whether I considered myself a financial advisor or not. But everybody’s talking about the story and it’s getting a lot of clicks, so it’s Mission Accomplished for New York magazine, I suppose.

If someone claiming to be a CIA agent called you and claimed you were the subject of an elaborate ploy to steal your identity, and your only way out was to empty your bank account and get rid of that cash ASAP, would you fall for it?

I’d like to think I’d never do something that dumb. Perhaps you feel the same way. But did you know we’re wrong? We actually would be that stupid. If not, why are so many journalists insisting so?