George Loewenstein Quotes
If someone has been paying you or employing you, it is very difficult to blow the whistle. It offends our sense of loyalty.
George Loewenstein, Medical Ethicist and Economist, Explanation of why physicians who are being paid to try new drugs with patients do not often report adverse results to the Food & Drug Administration, Quoted in New York Times, February 15, 2013
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Once he assumed the Presidency however, he flip flopped on this issue and approved prosecution of the Drake case and other whitle blowers. At the beginning of his second term, Edward Snowden, tried to get his superiors to do something about the massive surveillance of the American Public that the intelligence agencies were carrying out in secret. When Snowden was ignored, he went public through two newspapers. Obama castigated him for revealing that the government officials had lied and were operating a secret spying and eavesdropping system monitoring virtually every American. The Obama Administration chased him around the world trying to get him extradited for criminal trial in the United States.
The city was besieged by the Ottoman Turks. The Emperor stayed and died in the siege. Ironically, if he had escaped earlier and allowed the city to surrender to the Sultan and his troops, very few of the city residents would have died, and the rapine and pillaging never would have occurred. The negative result is that the Muslims would have controlled what was regarded by many Christians as a holy Christian city. But that is exactly what occurred.
Indeed his valet was a spy who worked for the British. However, Franklin assumed that European courts and capitals were filled with spies, and instead of trying constantly to ferret them out, he made sure that he never allowed anyone to know what he wanted to keep secret. While Jefferson essentially adopted the same viewpoint, John Adams, much more uptight and rigid, was very distressed with Franklin over their differences in counter-espionage strategy. In reality, no secrets ever leaked back to England, but their spies sent some of the most absurd reports of the “evil” Dr. Franklin. He was designing a huge set of lenses that could be pointed at the British fleet in the Channel, magnify the rays of the sun and set the ships ablaze. Another had Franklin designing a chain that would be stretched from France to England and an electric current transmitted thereupon causing the English island to blow up. These reports made Franklin and the French the first who were feared for their plans to design and deploy weapons of mass destruction.
George Loewenstein is an American educator and economist. He is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Center for Behavioral Decision Research. He is a leader in the fields of behavioral economics (which he is also credited with co-founding) and neuroeconomics.
