Recently by Simon Black: Imminent Threat
I had lunch yesterday with one of the sharpest financial minds I’ve met in a long time at a rather picturesque setting overlooking Evergreen Lake, west of Denver.
The restaurant patrons were all well-to-do residents of this wealthy community… in fact, the whole area is like a bubble, largely shielded from any negative effect of the economic fallout thus far. Most of these folks have gone about their lives over the last few years completely oblivious to the global financial crisis.
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My friend agreed; he told me, “Most of the people sitting in this restaurant haven’t felt a thing. Their guard is down, and they have no idea what’s coming. It makes me nervous.”
Indeed, there’s a large segment of people in this country who have not been directly affected by the meltdown. They still have their jobs, they haven’t been foreclosed, they haven’t been directly threatened by the government, they haven’t been robbed (by the private sector).
Their experience with the poor economy is second-degree… what they read in the papers or see on TV. But overall they live in a bubble. I can only describe this as the calm before the storm… and people are completely blind to the clouds forming around them.
Being blind to the obvious is part of the human condition. And this morning, a friend from London sent me an email describing a rather interesting experiment on the subject. It’s called the Invisible Gorilla.
Subjects in the experiment are asked to watch a video in which groups of players are passing basketballs back and forth. Half of the players in the video are wearing black uniforms, half white.
The subjects are asked to ignore the players wearing black jerseys and count the number of times the players wearing white pass the ball to each other. Halfway through the short video, someone wearing a gorilla suit walks on to the screen, thumps his chest, and walks off.
Here’s where it gets interesting – about half of the subjects participating in the experiment don’t notice the gorilla. They’re so focused on counting the white team’s passes and ignoring everything else that their minds naturally filter out something completely obvious.
